The contradictory testimonies will not have changed anything. Leonard Taylor, a 58-year-old African-American man sentenced to death for a quadruple murder he denied until the end, was executed on Tuesday evening. His lawyers had lodged a final appeal before the Supreme Court of the United States, in vain.
The Innocence Project, which fights against miscarriages of justice and defends Leonard Taylor, however assures that the incriminating testimony of his brother had been obtained under duress and that he had then retracted. His lawyers recently introduced a testimony from his daughter which assures that he was in California with her at the time of the murders, without succeeding in obtaining a reopening of the file.
Brother’s retraction
Leonard Taylor was sentenced to death in 2008 for the murder of his girlfriend and her three children, aged 5 to 10. They had been found dead in their house, each shot in the head, on December 3, 2004. According to the medical examiners, they had been dead for a few days.
Leonard Taylor has always maintained that they were still alive on November 26, when he left the home, located in Jennings, Missouri, to take a flight to California, on the other side of the country.
During the trial, the prosecutors had assured that he had confessed to the murders to his brother and made his weapon disappear in front of a witness, and the jurors had declared him guilty. But his brother, who has since died, later recanted, claiming to have been harassed and threatened by the police.
A complex timeline
Two testimonies undermine the chronology of the investigators. The victim’s sister said she went to her home on Saturday, November 27, after Leonard Taylor left for California, and that her sister was still alive. An aunt also certified that she spoke with her niece and children on the phone that day. A call that the private landline company has not confirmed, but that company does not archive all calls.
At trial, prosecutors had certified that the sister and aunt had mixed up dates. They had presented a test attesting to the presence of a tiny trace of blood on Leonard Taylor’s sunglasses. But it was a preliminary test that is not 100% reliable, and a complementary test could not be carried out. A DNA test had then identified the presence, also on the glasses, of a partial trace which could belong to the partner of Leonard Taylor, without however being able to determine that it came from his blood. A weapon had been located on the indications of a witness, and bullets of the same caliber found at the crime scene and in Leonard Taylor’s car.
The medical examiner, who had initially dated the deaths to a period ranging from a few days to a week, at most, before the discovery of the bodies – which excluded Leonard Taylor – had then changed his estimate. The coroner, who has since died, explained that he had taken the air conditioning set at 10° celcius into account incorrectly, which could have slowed down the process of decomposition of the corpses.
Despite these uncertainties, Missouri Governor Mike Parson denied Leonard Taylor’s request for clemency on Monday. “The evidence shows that Taylor did indeed commit these atrocities, a jury found him guilty and the courts all upheld the sentence”, justified the elected Republican in a press release.