Missouri's third execution in as many months is scheduled for Tuesday, despite several groups pleading with the governor to call it off. Raheem Taylor, who once went by Leonard Taylor, is scheduled to die by lethal injection for the 2004 murders of his girlfriend and her three children.
Derrick Johnson, president of the national NAACP says the evidence presented at trial doesn't support Taylor's conviction. He calls the forensic evidence "unreliable," and writes that an autopsy shows the victims were killed two to three days before the bodies were found, when Taylor was in California. But during the trial, the medical examiner who conducted the autopsy contradicted his report, saying the victims could have been killed two to three weeks before they were found.
They also cite an affidavit from a Dr. Jane Turner, who says that a full audit of the autopsy reports "would discredit Dr. Burch's trial testimony that the deaths could have occurred more than a week and as much as two to three weeks earlier."
A Baptist church in St. Louis has also taken up his case. But St. Louis COunty Prosecutor Wesley Bell declined to reconsider the case, and former prosecutor Bob McCullough says alibis provided by Taylor's daughter and relatives were "completely made up."
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