ST. LOUIS (AP) — The St. Louis County District Attorney’s Office will appeal to the Missouri Supreme Court a judge’s decision that overturned the conviction and death sentence for Marcellus Williamswhose execution will take place in a week.

An appeal filed Monday evening did not provide details of the grounds for the appeal.

Meanwhile, a clemency petition to Governor Mike Parson stresses that the murder victim’s relatives are against Williams’ execution. And Williams’ lawyers asked a federal court on Tuesday to reconsider a previously rejected appeal. The appeal claims that black jurors were not selected for Williams’ criminal trial in 2001 because of their race. Williams is black.

Williams, 55, will die by Injection September 24 for the stabbing murder of Lisha Gayle in her home in University City, Missouri, in 1998. It would be the third execution in Missouri that year and the 14th nationwide.

Democratic District Attorney of St. Louis County Wesley Bell cited questions about DNA evidence about the murder weapon when he requested a hearing to contest Williams’ guilt. Bell said the evidence suggested the butcher knife used to kill Gayle had another person’s DNA on it, but not Williams’.

But a few days before a hearing on August 21 new tests showed that the DNA evidence had been tampered with because prosecutors had touched the knife without gloves before the original trial in 2001.

In the absence of DNA evidence, attorneys from the Midwest Innocence Project, working on behalf of Williams, reached a compromise with prosecutors: in exchange for a new life sentence without parole, Williams would enter a new plea of ​​first-degree murder.

Judge Bruce Hilton signed the agreement, as did Gayle’s family. But at the urging of Republican Attorney General Andrew Bailey, the Missouri Supreme Court blocked the agreement and ordered Hilton to face a Evidence hearing.

Hilton decided on September 12 that the conviction for premeditated murder and the death sentence would remain in place.

“Every error raised by Williams on appeal, post-conviction review, and habeas corpus review has been rejected by the Missouri courts,” Hilton wrote. “There is no basis for a court to find Williams innocent, and no court has made such a finding.”

The Midwest Innocence Project provided The Associated Press with a copy of the clemency petition asking Parson to spare Williams’ life. Parson, a Republican and former county sheriff, has been in office for 11 executions and has never granted clemency.

The petition focuses on Gayle’s relatives demanding that his sentence be commuted to life imprisonment without parole.

“For the family, it is closure that Marcellus is allowed to live,” the petition states. “Marcellus’ execution is not necessary.”

A spokesman for Parsons said in an email Tuesday that lawyers from the governor’s office had met with Williams’ legal team and that Parson would announce his decision later, usually at least a day before the scheduled execution.

At the hearing in August, Deputy Attorney General Michael Spillane said that in addition to the DNA evidence, other evidence pointed to his guilt.

“They call the evidence in this case weak. It was overwhelming,” Spillane said.

At the hearing, Williams’ prosecutor, Keith Larner, was also asked why the trial jury had only one black juror. Larner said he had rejected only three potential black jurors, including one who he said looked like Williams.

Hayley Bedard, a spokeswoman for the Death Penalty Information Center, said there has been no proven case of the execution of an innocent person in the United States since the death penalty was reinstated in 1972. However, nearly two dozen people have been executed “despite strong and credible protestations of their innocence.”

Prosecutors in Williams’ original case said he broke into Gayle’s home on August 11, 1998, heard water running in the shower and found a large butcher knife. As Gayle came down the stairs, she was stabbed 43 times. Her purse and her husband’s laptop were stolen.

Authorities said Williams stole a jacket to hide blood on his shirt. Williams’ girlfriend asked him why he would wear a jacket on a hot day. The girlfriend said she later saw the laptop in the car and Williams sold it a day or two later.

Prosecutors also relied on testimony from Henry Cole, who was in a cell with Williams in 1999 when Williams was incarcerated on other charges. Cole told prosecutors that Williams confessed to the murder and provided details about it.

Williams’ lawyers responded that both the girlfriend and Cole had been convicted of serious crimes and were asking for a $10,000 reward.

Williams was close to being executed once before. In August 2017, just hours before his scheduled death, then-Governor Eric Greitens, a Republican, a stay granted after examining the same DNA evidence that led Bell to seek to overturn the conviction.

A petition signed by 525,000 people on change.org calls for a stop to the execution.