Marcellus Williams is scheduled to die tonight in Missouri after the U.S. Supreme Court rejected his appeal

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Marcellus Williams, whose murder conviction was questioned by a prosecutor based on new evidence, is scheduled to be executed Tuesday evening after the U.S. Supreme Court rejected his request to stay the execution.

The court did not provide a reason for its decision, which is standard for cases on the court's emergency docket. In two of Williams' appeals, there were no noted dissents. In a third appeal, Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson said they would have granted the stay of execution request.

The 55-year-old is scheduled to be executed by lethal injection at 6 p.m. CT at Bonne Terre State Prison.

The U.S. Supreme Court's decision came a day after the Supreme Court and Missouri's governor denied a stay of execution. Williams' lawyers filed a series of appeals based on new evidence – including alleged bias in jury selection and contamination of the murder weapon before trial. The victim's family had asked that the inmate be spared death.

“Tonight, Missouri will execute an innocent man, even though the prosecutor does not want him executed, the jury that sentenced him to death does not want him executed, and the victims themselves do not want him executed,” one of Williams' attorneys, Tricia Rojo Bushnell, told CNN's Jake Tapper. “We have a system that values ​​finality over fairness, and that is the result we will get from it.”

The decision was made just moments before Bushnell's interview with Tapper.

“This is news to all of us and I think we should all be ashamed that we have a system that allows a man to be executed despite all of this. This is really not a justice system,” the lawyer said, adding that members of Williams' legal team and his family will be with him before the execution.

Williams was convicted in 2001 of killing Felicia Gayle, a former newspaper reporter who was found stabbed to death in her home in 1998.

Recently, St. Louis County's top prosecutor joined Williams' lawyers in calling for the conviction to be overturned after new prosecutor testimony from the 2001 trial and recent DNA testing showed contamination of the evidence.

The case highlights the question of whether an innocent person might be executed – an inherent risk of the death penalty. At least 200 people sentenced to death since 1973 have later been acquitted, including four in Missouri, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.

Williams' attorneys and St. Louis County Attorney Wesley Bell filed a joint brief Saturday asking the Missouri Supreme Court to remand the case to a lower court for a “more comprehensive hearing” on Bell's January motion to overturn Williams' 2001 conviction and sentence.

The St. Louis district attorney's office, which tried Williams, argued in its motion that a DNA test of the knife used in the murder could indicate that Williams was not Gayle's killer.

But that effort failed at a district court hearing last month after new DNA tests revealed that the murder weapon had been improperly handled before the 2001 trial – contaminating the evidence intended to exonerate Williams and complicating his efforts to prove his innocence.

The attorneys “received a report indicating that the DNA on the murder weapon belonged to an assistant district attorney and an investigator who had handled the murder weapon without gloves prior to trial,” the state Attorney General's Office said.

But the Missouri Attorney General's Office said new DNA findings released last month did not exonerate Williams.

“In this case, a new round of DNA testing has proven that the office was right from the start; the knife in question has been handled by many parties, including police, since it was found,” said Attorney General Andrew Bailey.

“In addition, one of the defense experts previously testified that he could not rule out the possibility that Williams' DNA was also on the knife. He could only testify that enough actors had held the knife throughout the trial that other people's DNA was present.”

Other evidence that contributed to Williams' conviction “remained intact,” the attorney general said.

“The victim's personal belongings were found in Williams' car after the murder. A witness testified that Williams sold him the victim's laptop. Williams confessed to the murder to his girlfriend and an inmate at the St. Louis City Jail, and Williams' girlfriend saw him disposing of the bloody clothing he was wearing during the murder,” the Attorney General's Office said.

Williams' lawyers asked the U.S. Supreme Court last month for a stay of execution, citing “newly discovered evidence from the prosecutor's testimony.”

During a hearing on a motion to quash the case on August 28, a prosecutor from Williams' 2001 case “admitted that he had rejected (a potential juror from the jury pool) because (the potential juror) was black, as was Mr. Williams,” Williams' lawyers wrote in an emergency motion asking the U.S. Supreme Court to intervene.

“There was a racial component,” attorney Jonathan Potts said Monday at a hearing before the Missouri Supreme Court. But the Missouri Attorney General's office disputed that interpretation of the prosecutor's testimony.

“He said they look like brothers,” Assistant Attorney General Michael Spillane said at the hearing.

“What did he say when we asked him directly, 'Have you hit anyone … and in part stated that you are black?' He said no, absolutely not,” Spillane said. “And he explained that would be a violation.”

In the end, the Missouri Supreme Court unanimously decided not to stop Williams' execution because his team “failed to establish by clear and convincing evidence Williams' actual innocence or a constitutional error in the original criminal trial that undermines confidence in the verdict of the original criminal trial,” the court said in its opinion.

And: “Since this court rejects the appeal on the merits, the application for suspension of execution is rejected as devoid of substance.”

Republican Gov. Michael Parson, who also has the power to stop Williams' execution, said he would not intervene.

“Mr. Williams has exhausted every legal means and opportunity, including over 15 hearings in which he attempted to prove his innocence and overturn his conviction,” Parson said after the state Supreme Court's decision.

“No jury or court, at the trial, appellate, or Supreme Court level, has ever found Mr. Williams' claims of innocence to be justified. Ultimately, his conviction and death sentence were affirmed. None of the actual facts of this case led me to believe in Mr. Williams' innocence, so Mr. Williams' punishment will be carried out as ordered by the Supreme Court.”

The St. Louis District Attorney's Office said it reached a plea agreement with Williams last month. Under the settlement – which was approved by the court and Gayle's family – Williams would plead guilty to first-degree murder under the Alford plea and be sentenced to life in prison.

But the state's attorney general opposed the deal and appealed to the state Supreme Court, which blocked the agreement.

In the Williams case, Bell – who became St. Louis County's top prosecutor in 2018 and is now running as a Democratic candidate for Congress – faces Republican Attorney General Bailey, who is seeking re-election.

Bailey fought Bell's efforts to overturn Williams' conviction, arguing that new DNA test results would not exonerate Williams.

Williams' team filed a clemency petition with the U.S. Supreme Court last week, pointing out that Missouri's previous governor had postponed Williams' execution indefinitely because of doubts about the integrity of Williams' trial.

Former Republican Governor Eric Greitens had previously stopped Williams' execution and set up a commission to investigate his case and decide whether he should be granted clemency.

“The panel investigated Williams' case for the next six years – until Governor Michael Parson abruptly ended the proceedings,” Williams' lawyers wrote.

After taking office, Parson dissolved the panel and revoked Williams' stay of execution, the inmate's lawyers said. That decision deprived Williams of his right to due process, his lawyers argued.

“The Governor's actions violated Williams' constitutional rights and made the Court's attention extremely urgent,” Williams' lawyers said in court documents.

Parson defended his decision. “This board was created almost six years ago and it's time to move forward,” Parson said last summer. “We could spend another six years stalling and delaying, postponing justice, leaving a victim's family in the dark and not solving anything. This administration will not do that.”

But allowing Williams to be executed without further investigation would undermine the criminal justice system, his lawyers said.

The U.S. Supreme Court “must intervene to prevent this irreparable injustice,” Bushnell said ahead of the Supreme Court's decision on Tuesday.

“Missouri is on the verge of executing an innocent man, an outcome that calls into question the legitimacy of the entire criminal justice system.”

CNN's Dakin Andone, Lauren Mascarenhas, John Fritz and Jennifer Hauser contributed to this report.