Missouri governor won’t halt execution

ST. LOUIS — Missouri Gov. Mike Parson said Monday that he will not grant clemency and halt the execution of Raheem Taylor, who faces lethal injection for the deaths of his girlfriend and her three children.

Taylor, 58, is scheduled to be put to death this evening at the state prison in Bonne Terre.

“Despite his self- serving claim of innocence, the facts of his guilt in this gruesome quadruple homicide remain,” Parson, a Republican, said in a statement. “The State of Missouri will carry out Taylor’s sentences … and deliver justice for the four innocent lives he stole.”

Parson’s decision came despite a letter from Derrick Johnson, president of the national NAACP, asking Parson to grant a stay of execution. Johnson wrote that “evidence presented at trial does not support Mr. Taylor’s conviction.”

Separately, nearly three dozen civil rights and religious groups asked St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney Wesley Bell to reconsider his decision not to ask a judge for a new hearing on Taylor’s claim that he was not even in Missouri when the killings occurred.

Although his office would not have sought the death penalty, Bell said in a statement Monday, “we believe the jury got the verdict right” and he wouldn’t seek a new hearing.

Meanwhile, former St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney Bob McCulloch, whose office prosecuted the 2004 case, told The Associated Press that Taylor’s claims of innocence are “nonsense,” and the evidence against him is overwhelming.

Taylor called into the church service Sunday at Greater Fairfax Missionary Baptist Church in St. Louis. He thanked those who support him.

McCulloch said evidence suggested that Angela Rowe and her kids were killed on the night of Nov. 22 or on Nov. 23, 2004, when Taylor was still in St. Louis County. Taylor boarded a flight Nov. 26, 2004 to California.

On Dec. 3, 2004, police were sent to the home in Jennings after worried relatives said they hadn’t heard from Rowe.

Officers found the bodies of Rowe and her children, who had been shot. Authorities believe Taylor shot Rowe during a violent argument, then killed the children because they were witnesses.

The execution would be the third in Missouri in three months.