Marcellus Williams was executed on Tuesday after pleas to halt his sentence failed with the Missouri Governor, Missouri Supreme Court, and U.S. Supreme Court.

Ahead of the lethal injection, Williams was asked if he had any last words and he reportedly said “All praise be to Allah in every situation,” according to the Missouri Department of Corrections.

His last meal consisted of chicken wings and tater tots, Missouri Department of Corrections spokesperson Karen Pojmann told USA Today. He had one final visit from Imam Jalahii Kacem for around 90 minutes.

Williams was convicted of the 1999 stabbing death of Lisha Gayle, a former police reporter for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. He had maintained his innocence throughout the trial more than two decades ago and the case has attracted the attention of advocacy groups such as the Innocence Project, who attempted to get the death sentence overturned.

Williams ‘ attorneys appealed to the Missouri Supreme Court who unanimously denied a stay of execution stating in their ruling that his attorneys “failed to demonstrate by clear and convincing evidence Williams’ actual innocence or constitutional error at the original criminal trial.”

William’s attorneys argued that there were flaws in the jury selection process as well as the handling of the murder weapon, which did not have his DNA on it. The victim’s family had even come out and said they did not want Williams to be executed.

Missouri Gov. Mike Parson also declined Williams’s appeals for clemency allowing the execution to go forward.

His attorneys made a last-ditch effort to save William’s life by appealing to the U.S. Supreme Court but they declined to intervene and did not provide a reasoning for the decision which is common for emergency docket cases. Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson said they would have granted the appeal to pause the execution.

“Tonight, Missouri will execute an innocent man, and they will do it even though the prosecutor doesn’t want him to be executed, the jurors who sentenced him to death don’t want him executed and the victims themselves don’t want him to be executed,” one of Williams’ attorneys, Tricia Rojo Bushnell, told CNN’s Jake Tapper before the execution. “We have a system that values finality over fairness, and this is the result that we will get from that.”

The top prosecutor in St. Louis had recently joined in the calls for William’s conviction to be overturned citing new DNA evidence that showed the murder weapon was contaminated as well as testimony from the original prosecutor of the case.

Both the St. Louis County Prosecutor Wesley Bell and William’s legal team filed a joint brief asking the Missouri Supreme Court to send the case back to lower courts for a “more compressive hearing.” Bell had also filed a motion back in January asking the courts to vacate the conviction. He argued in the motion that new DNA evidence had come to light suggesting that Williams may not be Gayle’s killer. The Missouri Attorney General’s Office said that the new DNA evidence did not exonerate Williams.

“In this case, a new round of DNA testing proved the office was right all along; the knife in question has been handled by many actors, including law enforcement since being found,” Attorney General Andrew Bailey said. “In addition, one of the defense’s own experts previously testified he could not rule out the possibility that Williams’s DNA was also on the knife. He could only testify to the fact that enough actors had handled the knife throughout the legal process that others’ DNA was present.”

According to The Death Penalty Information Center, at least 200 people sentenced to death since 1973 were later exonerated, including four in Missouri.