Staff File Photo by Shane McMillan--Rejon Taylor is escorted into federal court in Chattanooga. The sentencing phase of Chattanooga's first federal death penalty case began today.
Posted on 09/16/2008 12:54:16 PM PDT by SmithL
Jurors were supposed to begin hearing arguments this morning on why they should save convicted killer Rejon Taylor’s life, but a series of “inflammatory” phones calls Mr. Taylor made to his family within the last two weeks prompted the judge to continue the case until next Monday.
“We’re going to be asking the jury to sentence (Mr. Taylor) to death, and this is one of the reasons why,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Steve Neff told U.S. District Judge Curtis L. Collier Tuesday, trying to persuade him to let the jurors hear the contents of the phone conversations.
According to some of the calls, Mr. Taylor called the 18-member jury panel a bunch of “racist rednecks” after they convicted him of murder, kidnapping and carjacking last week in the death of an Atlanta restaurant owner taken from his home in Buckhead in 2003 and shot on the side of a road in Collegedale.
At one point in the conversations, Mr. Taylor apparently talks about “what is above him and below him” in Chattanooga’s federal building where he has been standing trial. Prosecutors say that comment is part of Mr. Taylor’s ongoing attempt to escape from custody.
Mr. Taylor also mentions that “jail isn’t that bad,” despite his defense attorneys’ plans to argue at the sentencing hearing that being incarcerated for the rest of his life would be worse than receiving the death penalty.
Defense attorney Leslie Cory told the judge that the phone calls were made to family members and do not in any way Mr. Taylor’s “lack of remorse or dangerousness.”
A hearing will be held Monday on whether the prosecution will be allowed to let jurors listen to the recordings.
Why? So he can sit on death row for 15 years? If found guilty, execute within 24 hours.
The trend in WA state is to claim that murders are mentally ill, even if they kill six people, including a police officer in a state of drug induced psychosis.
The prosecutors tried to suppress the statement of one of the victims, who didn’t die, because he was a retired NY parole officer who stated that the guy was obviously psychotic, high on some kind of drug.
Then, the next week, we read about a judge letting a man, declared not guilty by reason of insanity, out of the mental ward five years after brutally murdering his wife, because the prosecutor provided no evidence.
This has been called “Chattanooga’s first federal death penalty case.”
It is hard to believe that in the history of Chattanooga, there have never been any other federal death penalty cases.
But, naturally, Chattanooga is older than the Federal Court. And Capital punishment was suspended in the United States from 1972 through 1976 because of Furman v. Georgia, 408 U.S. 238 (1972).
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