Attorneys Request Review Ahead of Leonard Taylor's Execution

A Missouri death row inmate set to be executed on Tuesday has a credible case of innocence that needs to be investigated, say multiple organizations for wrongfully convicted individuals in a recent court filing.

The Midwest Innocence Project, Innocence Project and the nonprofit law firm of Phillips Black requested Governor Mike Parson appoint an independent board of inquiry to evaluate Leonard “Raheem” Taylor’s innocence late yesterday.

Taylor, who was convicted in 2008 for the 2004 murders of his girlfriend Angela Rowe and her three children, says he was 1,800 miles away at the time.

No court has ever been presented with Taylor’s innocence claim, let alone a fully investigated one, Midwest Innocence Project Executive Director Tricia Rojo Bushnell tells the RFT. She says it would be wholly unjust for Taylor to be executed without a thorough investigation into his case.

“We certainly believe based on the evidence that Mr. Taylor is innocent,” Bushnell says. “But those determinations should be made by a fact finder.”

Officers found Rowe and her children’s bodies at their home in Jennings on December 3, 2004. Rowe and her 10-year-old daughter Alexus Conley, 6-year-old daughter AcQreya Conley and 5-year-old son Tyrese Conley were shot to death.

As Rowe’s live-in boyfriend, and with a criminal record for drug- and fraud-related crimes, Taylor immediately became a suspect. He was arrested four days later in Kentucky.

Since the original trial, new evidence has surfaced supporting Taylor’s claim that was out of state at the time of the murders. Taylor says he was in California visiting his daughter at the time of Rowe and her children’s deaths.

The key to Taylor’s claim of innocence is the Rowe family’s time of death. In a pretrial deposition, medical examiner Dr. Phillip Burch said Rowe and her children were killed approximately two to three days before their bodies were found.

Yet during trial, Burch “drastically changed his opinion” regarding time of death, Taylor’s lawyers say, from two to three days before the bodies were found to two to three weeks earlier, when Taylor would have still been in town.

In a recent court filing, Taylor’s lawyers said Taylor boarded a flight to California eight days before the Rowe family’s bodies were found — making it impossible for him to have committed the crime within the medical examiner’s time frame. Airport surveillance footage confirmed Taylor’s alibi.

In a continuation of its barbaric killing spree, #Missouri is 14 days away from executing Leonard “Raheem” Taylor, who was wrongfully convicted of murder despite an airtight alibi that put him 1800 miles from the victims at the time of the crime. pic.twitter.com/O9Zk1K3kdX

— MacArthur Justice Center (@MacArthrJustice) January 25, 2023

None of Taylor’s attorneys retained a forensic pathologist to review the medical examiner’s switched conclusion until one week ago. In an affidavit this week, Dr. Jane Turner, a former assistant in the St. Louis medical examiner’s office, said Rowe and her children could have been dead for days and not weeks.

Witness accounts also suggest the murders didn’t occur until after Taylor would have been thousands of miles away. Multiple witnesses, including the victims’ relatives and a neighbor, testified they saw Rowe and her children during the time frame of when the prosecution claimed they were dead.

Also, Taylor’s daughter, Deja Taylor, who was 13 at the time of Taylor’s supposed murders, said in a sworn declaration last November that Taylor had called Rowe in St. Louis and put his daughter on the phone to have a conversation with Rowe and one of Rowe’s children.

Taylor’s advocates have also cast doubt on a statement Taylor’s brother made to police. Perry Taylor told police his brother had confessed to him that he committed the murders.

But Perry Taylor later recanted this statement. He said he felt coerced by police to implicate his brother: that officers had repeatedly threatened him with physical harm and prison time and threatened his mother. Perry Taylor died in 2015.

Parson is not legally obligated to respond to the request for a board of inquiry, according to Bushnell. Doing so would not require Parson to accept Taylor’s possible innocence.

“What we’re asking him is to recognize that a system requires a full investigation and a fair assessment of all the facts,” Bushnell says.

A Missouri governor has not appointed a board of inquiry since 2017, when former Governor Eric Greitens stayed Marcellus Williams’ execution just hours before he was set to be executed. Williams still remains on death row, however. The panel has since reviewed Williams’ case and made recommendations to Parson. The governor has yet to act on those recommendations.

The request for a board of inquiry could be Taylor’s last shot at life. St. Louis County Prosecutor Wesley Bell said Monday his office would not file a motion to vacate Taylor’s sentence. “The facts are not there to support a credible case of innocence,” Bell said in a statement. And on Thursday the Missouri Supreme Court overruled a motion to delay Taylor’s execution so experts could have more time to examine the case.

Even after the slim chance the board recommends an overturn of Taylor’s conviction and the governor complies, Taylor would still remain in jail for an unrelated rape case.

Michelle Smith, co-director of Missourians to Abolish the Death Penalty, told the RFT in an interview Thursday that Taylor is optimistic — but she’s not.

Taylor’s execution is on track to be the third execution in Missouri in three months. Both of the recently executed death row inmates — Amber McLaughlin and Kevin Johnson — fought till their last moments to delay their executions with no success.

“I hope the people who are trying to save him succeed,” Smith says. “But I understand that this country kills innocent people.”

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