'Violence will Not be Tolerated Unless it is Done by Us': Missouri Governor also Unlikely to do Anything about the State Approved Murder of Leon Taylor

Execution is Wednesday. Black Man Sentenced to Death by All White Jury to Revenge the Murder of a White Victim. Offering only hypocrisy in the Michael Brown case, white Democrat Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon promised that a 'Vigorous Prosecution Would Be Pursued' in the deliberate death of the Black teenager, he nevertheless refused to appoint a special prosecutor to handle the case [MORE] with the state sanctioned murder of Leon Taylor pending you should expect more injustice in support of white collective power. 

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. (In video above, Capt. Ron, one of the three Blacks on the Ferguson police force is showcased like a potted plant.) 

From [HERE] In six years as Missouri's racist suspect 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 Democrat 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. 

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. [MORE]

He had a horrible 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 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.” [MORE]

Many, if not most, of the 12 people whose clemency petitions Nixon has turned down had horrible childhoods.

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. [MORE]

The death penalty is a crime committed by the society against a single individual, who is helpless. I cannot call it a penalty, it is a crime. -Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh

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 white trial judge made the decision, sentencing Taylor to death.

The Missouri Supreme Court affirmed the decision but ruled that the white 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.