Stefanie Faucher
This email contains news and commentary from:
- Colombia (MO) Daily Tribune (Opinion)- Execution order driven by misfortune, systemic racism
- St. Louis Post-Dispatch (Column)- Horrigan: The 'morally and intellectually troubling' case of Leon Taylor
- MissouriNet- Changed or not,
- KYTV (NBC, MO)-Death penalty protest planned in Springfield
Execution order driven by misfortune, systemic racism
By MARY RATLIFF and JEFF STACK, November 16, 2014
Executions snuff out human beings with the vast potential to be positive role models for fellow prisoners and to promote healing for crime victims. Missouri officials risk again creating an agonizing societal void if they execute Leon Taylor as planned early Wednesday morning.
Taylor would be the 11th person executed by our state since last November — the most in any year since 1899. Beyond issues of modernity and morality — we do oppose any murder by the person or state — citizens should be troubled by issues of racism and freakish legal misfortune in his case. We should appreciate Taylor’s spiritual transformation, rising as he has from a nightmarish childhood and street crime to become a foundational leader of the Christian community within the Potosi prison.
Taylor has long accepted responsibility for his wrongdoing in 1994 when he fatally shot Robert Newton during the robbery of a gas station in Independence. Many years ago, Taylor wrote to Astrid, Newton’s widow, apologizing for his actions and the grief he caused her and her family. She has accepted his remorse as sincere and has forgiven him. They eloquently share those heartfelt reflections in the documentary “Potosi: God in Death Row.”
Jim Hall was deeply touched by the film, which publicly premiered last month — seven months after Jeffrey Ferguson was executed for his role in the rape and murder of Hall’s 17-year-old daughter, Kelli. Ferguson, Taylor and two other men incarcerated in the Potosi prison speak with shame of their crimes.
Our society traditionally erects a figurative wall between offenders and those who have been offended — in addition to appropriate physical barriers for public safety — that can impede prospective healing. Hall never had the opportunity to see and hear Ferguson, much less interact with him while he was alive. He wasn’t emotionally ready to initiate contact. Hall and his family had publicly expressed support for the death penalty, including just after the execution. However, the execution has compounded rather than eased the family’s suffering. As Hall explained during recent public programs where he spoke against Taylor’s execution, family members realize they and many others are grieving the death of Ferguson.
Leon Taylor would be the second black man executed in Missouri in nearly as many months sentenced to death by an all-white jury for murdering a white victim. At least four other black men have similarly been convicted by all-white juries in Missouri and executed since 1989.
A racially mixed jury convicted Taylor of murder but was unable to unanimously agree to a death sentence, so the judge imposed it. On appeal, the sentence was reversed because the prosecutor made improper statements during closing arguments. The prosecutor at Taylor’s subsequent 1999 sentencing dismissed all six blacks from serving as jurors. The all-white jury recommended a death sentence. The judge, even while expressing concerns about the racial dynamics, affirmed their recommendation and imposed death.
In 2002, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Ring v. Arizona that judges could no longer sentence someone to death when jurors had not unanimously agreed to the sentence. The next year, the Missouri Supreme Court ruled the Ring precedent should be applied retroactively. The courts then commuted to life imprisonment the sentences of about a half-dozen inmates. The courts refused this remedy for Taylor. As one of his co-counsels has lamented, “If the prosecutor had not made improper argument at the 1995 sentencing, Leon Taylor’s original death sentence would automatically have been commuted to life. Instead, due to the prosecutor’s misconduct, he is now awaiting execution.”
Over the past two decades, Taylor has been a foundational leader of the Christian community in the Potosi prison, according to many accounts. He could continue to dwell as a positive influence if he were incarcerated and not executed.
His stand-up character is especially remarkable given his nightmarish childhood. Taylor’s 2005 habeas petition notes his mother, Mary, was a chronic alcoholic who gave her children alcohol beginning with Leon at age 5. “Many of the children watched as she stabbed and shot at least three of her boyfriends. ... Leon watched as Mary shot and killed her husband, Sammie Owens.”
She choked and beat all of her children, particularly when she was drunk, using her fists, switches, extension cords and other objects, the document notes. “She focused much of her anger and abuse on Leon” because he was the oldest and was expected to care for his siblings. “Strange men had access to the children; a 20-year-old male neighbor sexually abused Leon when he was five years old.” Attempts by other adults to intervene failed. The petition reports Taylor was removed from the home a few times.
The document cites a police record years after Leon was sent to another juvenile facility, noting, “nine other children were removed from Mary Owens’s home. The conditions in the home were horrendous. Mary was staggering drunk and cursed at the police. ... The children slept on urine-soaked mattresses, chairs or sofas. The house was full of spoiled food, and alcohol and Excedrin were available to the children. Insects crawled all over.”
Contact Gov. Jay Nixon’s office. Urge him to halt Taylor’s execution and commute his death sentence. Call 573-751-3222 or write via email at https://governor.mo.gov/get-involved/contact-the-governors-office.
On Tuesday, join “Vigils for Life,” remembering all murder victims and urging no more executions, from noon to 1 p.m. outside the Governor’s Office, second floor of the Capitol in Jefferson City, and from 5 to 6 p.m. at the Boone County Courthouse in Columbia. Call 573-449-4585 for more details.
Mary Ratliff is NAACP Missouri State Conference president, and Jeff Stack is coordinator of the Mid-Missouri Fellowship of Reconciliation.
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Horrigan: The 'morally and intellectually troubling' case of Leon Taylor Death penalty
A black murderer, a white jury and #Ferguson.
By Kevin Horrigan, November 16, 2014
In six years as Missouri's governor, Jay Nixon has received 13 petitions for clemency from inmates facing the death penalty. He's turned down all but one, and he never explained that decision.
Now the governor has a 14th petition before him. Leon V. Taylor, 56, is scheduled to die by lethal injection at one minute after midnight Wednesday at the Bonne Terre prison.
Every case is unique, but there's not much in Taylor's petition that the governor hasn't seen before. Taylor's appeals have been heard time and again by both state and federal judges.
He had a horrible childhood. Many, if not most, of the 12 people whose clemency petitions Nixon has turned down had horrible childhoods.
His lawyers argue in their petition that he's not the man he used to be, that he has been a model prisoner who has brought other inmates to the Christian faith. The governor has turned down clemency petitions from other model prisoners. Jay Nixon is hard-nosed on the death penalty.
But what Taylor has going for him that other condemned men didn't is timing. At a time when Missouri's pathetic record of racial discrimination is on international display, Nixon will be asked to sign a death warrant for a black man who was sentenced to death by an all-white jury. The optics, as they say in politics, could be a problem.
In April 1994, Leon Taylor committed a horrible crime, shooting Robert Newton to death in the course of an armed robbery. It wasn't his first killing; he'd been convicted of second-degree murder in 1975 for taking part in a fatal stabbing.
Mr. Newton, 53, was an attendant at a gas station in Independence. His 8-year-old stepdaughter witnessed the crime. Taylor's two companions on that night rolled over on him, testifying that he tried to shoot the little girl, too, but his gun jammed.
Taylor is black. Mr. Newton was white. It shouldn't matter, but it does. Taylor's lawyers cite studies that show that prosecutors are nearly 50 percent more likely to seek the death penalty for black defendants whose victims are white than they are for those who victims also are black. And when black defendants go to trial on a capital charge, they are five times more likely to get the death sentence if their victims were white.
When Taylor went to trial in 1994, he was convicted of first-degree murder by a jury of eight whites and four blacks. But death penalty cases require a second phase, when jurors must decide on death or life. In Missouri, the only alternative to the death penalty is life without possibility of parole.
In the penalty phase, the Taylor jury was unable to make a decision. So, as then was required by Missouri law, the trial judge made the decision, sentencing Taylor to death.
The Missouri Supreme Court affirmed the decision but ruled that the prosecutor had erred during the penalty phase by urging the jurors to "get mad" and impose death. Getting mad is not one of the circumstances the law allows for imposing the death penalty.
So Taylor got a new sentencing proceeding with a new jury. In picking the jurors, the prosecution used six of its nine peremptory challenges to strike prospective black jurors. An all-white jury sentenced Taylor to death.
It gets trickier. In 2003, the state Supreme Court ruled that prisoners condemned to death by judges after a hung jury - as happened in Taylor's first sentencing - should have their sentences commuted to life in prison. The commutations were applied retroactively, but because Taylor had received a new sentencing hearing by a new jury after the "get mad" finding, his death sentence stood.
So because he committed a terrible crime, and because the prosecutor screwed up, and because a second, all-white, jury decided on death, Leon Taylor faces death at 12:01 a.m. next Wednesday.
Taylor and his lawyers raised the question of the jury's composition on appeal. The state Supreme Court upheld the trial court's decision that there were "race-neutral" reasons for eliminating potential black jurors, among them opposition to the death penalty. A federal judge in Kansas City affirmed the Supreme Court decision.
Race-neutral or not, there was at least one person who was bothered by the composition of the jury: the man who presided over the process.
Charles E. Atwell, a former prosecutor (and a white man) who is now retired from the Jackson County Circuit Court bench, wrote, "In complete candor, this Court finds it . . . morally and intellectually troublesome the concept that a black defendant in Jackson County, Missouri, could be sentenced to death based upon the recommendation of an all-white jury."
"Morally and intellectually troublesome" is a phrase that could describe the entire death penalty debate. It could describe the history of racial disparities in Missouri. Not many morally and intellectually troublesome problems can be fixed overnight. One of them could be.
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Changed or not, execution looms for Missouri inmate Leon Taylor
By Mike Lear, November 14, 2014
BONNE TERRE, Mo. -- The attorney for the man Missouri is scheduled to execute next week told Missourinet he is a changed man, but one of the men that prosecuted him remains confident the death sentence is just. Some lawmakers are asking Gov. Nixon for clemency.
It’s been more than 20 years since Leon Taylor fatally shot Robert Newton, the attendant of an Independence service station that Taylor had just robbed. After killing Newton, Taylor attempted to shoot Taylor’s then-eight-year-old stepdaughter as well, but the gun didn’t fire, and he left her with Newton’s body.
Taylor is sentenced to die by lethal injection early Wednesday morning at the prison at Bonne Terre.
The Springfield chapter of Missourians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty (MADP) will hold a vigil on Tuesday, November 18 from noon to 1 p.m. in downtown Park Central Square to protest Taylor's scheduled execution.
Read a letter to Gov. Nixon from Missouri legislators requesting clemency for Taylor.
Attorney Elizabeth Unger Carlyle has represented Taylor since 2003. She said he is a “dramatically” different man than he was on April 14, 1994.
“He has become a real force for good and a force for God at the Potosi Correctional Center,” said Carlyle.
She said a petition for clemency transmitted this week to the office of Governor Jay Nixon includes statements from people inside and outside the prison about his influence and letters from pastoral groups and current and former legislators urging the governor to commute his sentence.
The Governor’s office’s policy is to not offer comment on pending applications for clemency, and Nixon has only granted clemency one in his six years as governor.
Carlyle knows the governor’s track record regarding clemency, which includes denying it for men executed since November of last year.
She believes the one time Nixon granted clemency, in the case of Richard Clay who also committed a murder in Missouri in 1994, he based that decision on a number of factors, “including the activities of the person in prison.”
Carlyle knows skepticism is common toward people sentenced to death who claim to find religion and change for the better, but she believes Taylor is legitimate.
“One of the things Leon does is he’s a songwriter and he writes and records his own praise songs,” said Carlyle. “I think if you listen to them you can see that they come from his heart and I think that’s where his heart is.”
Taylor wrote a letter of apology and a poem for Newton’s widow, Astrid Newton Martin. Martin said in the 2012 documentary Potosi: God in Death Row, that she has forgiven Taylor.
“It took me … I think 17, almost 18 years to finally realize I need to forgive and I did,” Martin said in the film. “I can honestly say I forgive him if he really means what he said in the letter.”
“You did some horrible stuff to me and for a long time I could not forgive you,” Martin said of Taylor, “especially knowing you were trying to hurt my little girl.”
Martin’s daughter, now nearly 30, has declined recent requests for media interviews. The film includes a recording of what she had to say in a 1995 radio interview.
“I have never had so many nightmares,” she said then. “The best thing in my life was destroyed. Now I too feel like dying … it’s lonely out here with no dad. It is dumb for the best, sweetest and kindest man and dad to be killed over a lousy $450. I think Leon Taylor should get the death penalty.”
Taylor’s relatives that were with him the night of the murder said he later said of the little girl that he, “should have choked the bitch.”
The attempt Taylor made to kill her is one of the “aggravating factors” Michael Hunt and the rest of the prosecution team presented when it asked for the death penalty.
“Reasons why this is different than any other case,” Hunt tells Missourinet in describing aggravating factors. “Essentially what you want to have are … egregious factors why this [case] is different.”
Hunt is still with the Jackson County Prosecutor’s office. He said the case stuck with him.
“The one thing you don’t ever forget is that little girl,” he told Missourinet. “It’s just so horrendous to hear her version of standing there, holding her stepfather’s hand as he is shot and killed, as he is pleading for his life, and then after he has been shot in the head, to have her describe how he turns that gun on her and pulls that trigger … that’s a horrendous act and it’s a horrendous act for her to have to relive and tell the jury.”
Hunt said he respects the beliefs of those who, for varying reasons, don’t want to see Taylor executed next week.
“When you start down this path on our side there has to be a comfort level that this is the appropriate punishment, because there’s no way that I could sit there as the prosecutor and ask that jury to sentence him to death unless I was comfortable with it,” Hunt said. “I was then and I am now.”
Taylor has also declined recent interview requests, but he is featured in that documentary. In it, he talked about growing up with an alcoholic mother and having to raise his brothers and sisters.
“The men who were supposed to be my role models, they weren’t. They were women beaters and alcoholics themselves, so that’s basically what I grew up around,” said Taylor.
At the time he reacted to the news that Missouri might soon resume carrying out executions, saying, “I’m not worried about that.”
Taylor continued, “If my number comes up during that time, I’m fine. I’m good. I’m ready.”
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Death penalty protest planned in Springfield
Nov 16, 2014
The Springfield chapter of Missourians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty will hold a vigil on Tuesday, November 18 from noon to 1 p.m. on Park Central Square to protest the scheduled execution of Missouri prison inmate Leon Taylor.
Taylor, 56, is scheduled to die for killing a Kansas City-area gas station attendant in 1994. Court records say Taylor also tried to kill the attendant’s step-daughter, but his gun jammed.
Supporters have sent a letter to Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon seeking clemency for Taylor, saying he was treated unfairly because of race. The mixed-race jury in Taylor’s first murder trial convicted him, but could not reach a verdict on punishment. The judge sentenced him to death. The sentence was overturned, and after a second trial, an all-white jury sentenced Taylor to death. Taylor is African-American.
After Taylor’s second sentence became final on appeal, the Missouri Supreme Court ruled, based on a U.S. Supreme Court decision, that if a jury could not agree on the death penalty, the judge could not then impose it, and subsequently commuted the sentences of all individuals on death row who had been given a death-sentence by a Judge under these circumstances. Taylor did not receive a commutation.
The Missouri Supreme Court had originally scheduled Taylor’s execution for September, but withdrew that death warrant after his lawyers said they would be unable to work on his case at that time.
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