Justice

 Washington Post - Marcellus Williams, who spent more than two decades on Missouri’s death row convicted of a 1998 murder that he said he did not commit, died by lethal injection Tuesday evening after a lengthy and complex effort to exonerate him based on DNA testing issues.Williams, 55, was pronounced dead at the Potosi Correctional Center in Mineral Point.

After two last-minute execution reprieves starting almost a decade ago, momentum to reexamine Williams’s decades-old conviction gathered from unlikely sources, including the local prosecutor from the office that convicted him. Williams received an outpouring of support from legal groups such as the Midwest Innocence Project and a member of Congress. The family of the victim in the 1998 St. Louis stabbing came to oppose Williams’s execution.

Late Tuesday afternoon, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to stay Williams’s execution. The court’s three liberal members — Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson — disagreed and said they would have granted the request to halt the execution