KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Attorneys for Missouri prisoner Leonard “Raheem” Taylor, who is scheduled to be executed Tuesday amid mounting calls for his innocence claims to be vetted, have appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court.
In seeking a stay of execution, Taylor’s lawyers argued a condemned man’s claim of wrongful conviction should receive “much more thorough and careful scrutiny” and that the Missouri Supreme Court failed when it denied him an evidence hearing.
“The hasty and summary denial of this claim by the court below undermines the integrity of the criminal justice system and, if left undisturbed will result in a constitutionally intolerable event on Tuesday evening — the execution of an innocent man,” they wrote.
Taylor, 58, is set to die by lethal injection at a prison in Bonne Terre, Missouri. In 2008, he was convicted in the 2004 quadruple murder of his girlfriend and her three children near St. Louis. He maintains he was halfway across the country when the victims were slain.
The Missouri Attorney General’s Office asked the high court to reject Taylor’s petition, arguing Taylor is guilty of the gruesome killings and saying any delay would frustrate “the interests of justice.”
“Taylor’s claims of innocence present nothing new and nothing that could raise doubts about the jury’s verdict,” the AG’s office wrote.
At the 2008 trial, prosecutors presented evidence that Taylor’s brother, Perry, told police that Taylor had confessed to him. But Perry Taylor, who has since died, later recanted that claim, saying he was threatened and coerced by the police.
But this week, Taylor’s attorneys said the “checkered backgrounds” of two officers who interrogated Perry Taylor raised more questions about his statements.
One of them, former officer John Zlatic, is now behind bars in Missouri serving a four-year sentence for videotaping his neighbors when they were fully or partially nude, according to court records. Another officer is “embroiled in civil rights litigation” that alleges the rights of protesters were violated in 2017 as they clashed with police in St. Louis, Taylor’s lawyers wrote.
But the bulk of the case hinges on when the victims were killed.
Surveillance video shows Taylor boarding a Southwest flight from St. Louis to Southern California on Nov. 26, 2004, a week before the victims were found dead. The bodies of Angela Rowe and her children were discovered Dec. 3.
Initially, investigators said the victims had been killed up to a few days before they were discovered.
But at trial, St. Louis County medical examiner Phillip Burch told jurors that the temperature in the house had been in the 50s, which led him to change the estimated time of death. The victims, he testified, could have been killed two to three weeks before their bodies were discovered — when Taylor would still have been in town.
In their petition to the U.S. Supreme Court, Taylor’s attorneys said his defense team was “blind-sided” by Burch’s testimony.
This year, forensic pathologist Jane Turner cast doubt on Burch’s finding, saying there was evidence of rigor mortis when the victims were found. That would not last more than a week after death, even with the cold temperature in the house, she said.
Based on Turner’s findings, Taylor would have been thousands of miles away when Rowe and the children were killed.
Taylor’s appeal to the Supreme Court marks a final attempt to halt his execution.
Last week, prosecutors in St. Louis County declined to directly intervene in Taylor’s case, but said they supported a stay of execution for his attorneys to further investigate the victims’ times of death.
Several groups, including the Innocence Project, urged Gov. Mike Parson to appoint a board of inquiry to investigate Taylor’s innocence claims. In 2017, Gov. Eric Greitens appointed such a board in the case of Marcellus Williams, halting his execution.
On Monday, Parson denied clemency and announced the state would carry out the lethal injection. He said evidence showed Taylor committed “these atrocities.”
“Despite his self-serving claim of innocence, the facts of his guilt in this gruesome quadruple homicide remain,” Parson said.
Sister Helen Prejean, a prominent death penalty opponent, noted Monday on Twitter that more than 3,300 people across the country have been exonerated of crimes for which they had been convicted.
“How can we continue to allow our legal system to mete out an irreversible punishment like the death penalty?” she asked.
Late last year, Kevin Johnson’s Missouri death penalty case reached the high court. In a split decision, the justices denied a stay and he was executed.
Should Taylor’s execution go forward, he will be the third person to die by lethal injection in 10 weeks in Missouri. In addition to Johnson, Missouri executed Amber McLaughlin on Jan. 3.
Missouri is one of five states that has scheduled executions this year.
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