Chattanooga: First time for death row

A Chattanooga defense attorney is vowing that his client’s death sentence, delivered Tuesday in a packed federal courtroom, will be overturned.

“I am 100 percent confident that it will be reversed for many reasons wherein supreme court decisions and federal statutory laws were ignored,” Bill Ortwein said Tuesday after learning Rejon Taylor’s fate.

Many in the legal community in attendance in U.S. District Court here were convinced that the 24-year-old convicted killer would receive life in prison instead.

A jury of 12 men and women decided unanimously that Mr. Taylor will die as punishment for a 2003 killing that left an Atlanta businessman dead on the side of a Collegedale road.

Prosecutors disagreed with Mr. Ortwein’s assessment of the case, calling the jury’s verdict a “fair” conclusion. Jurors declined to talk about their deliberations as they left the courthouse Tuesday, free for the first time to read media accounts of the two-month proceeding.

Mr. Taylor joins just 50 other federal prisoners in the nation now on death row in the wake of the rare verdict. Normally the domain of state judicial systems, seeking the death penalty in federal murder trials is sanctioned only in the most extreme cases of “reckless disregard for life.”

Assistant U.S. attorneys Steve Neff and Chris Poole prosecuted the case, the first-ever death penalty proceeding to be held in Eastern Tennessee’s federal courts district. Most trials in federal court in Chattanooga last no more than a couple of days and overwhelmingly deal with drug crimes — almost everything, they said, except murder.

“As a Christian, (Mr. Taylor’s) is the kind of case that drives you to your knees every night,” Mr. Neff said Tuesday. “You pray and pray that God will guide the jury’s decision. That’s what we did.”

A LENGTHY PROCESS

An Atlanta native, Mr. Taylor, who had been portrayed by the prosecution as a calculated killer, showed no emotion while he stood to hear his sentence. It came nearly two months after his trial began, a contentious court proceeding that would be punctuated by recorded phone conversations in which the defendant at one point called the verdict “racist” and described the same jurors charged with deciding his future as “little redneck-looking folk.”

Jurors never heard those comments during the penalty phase of the trial at which the defense presented testimony from family and friends, as well as a noted psychologist, in order to convince them not to put the defendant to death. They did, however, hear other conversations in which Mr. Taylor seemed to be laughing at the victim almost immediately after being convicted in mid-September of first-degree murder, kidnapping and carjacking.

It was evidence, the prosecution said, that proved Mr. Taylor had continued to show “absolutely no remorse” for his actions and deserved the harshest penalty.

According to the verdict, all 12 jurors believed in the “value” of Mr. Taylor’s life. They unanimously agreed in the end, however, that his “intentional killing” of 55-year-old French national Guy Luck far outweighed any mitigating factors that might have persuaded them to spare it. Those included the emotional abuse Mr. Taylor suffered from his felon father and the “inadequate parents” who according to testimony never made an effort to steer him from the criminal activities that ensnared him as a teenager.

“Mr. Taylor certainly has mixed emotions at this particular time,” Mr. Ortwein said on the steps of the federal courthouse immediately after court adjourned Tuesday. “He’s upset, frustrated and totally depressed.”

As a veteran trial attorney, Mr. Ortwein said before hearing Mr. Taylor’s sentence that the 11 prior death penalty trials he had worked on in his career had resulted in life prison sentences instead.

He also echoed his client’s opinion that aspects of the case might have been racially motivated.

“There is only one conclusion I can come to regarding why the Nazis in the Bush Department of Justice decided to seek the death penalty in this particular case,” Mr. Ortwein said Tuesday. “Statistically and overwhelmingly where the victim is white and the defendant is an African American, they certainly ask and seek for the death penalty.”

Prosecutors dismissed any notion that jurors somehow had decided to sentence Mr. Taylor to death because he is black. There was only one black juror among the 12 on the panel.

“Race had nothing to do with this,” Mr. Poole said, noting that the defense had participated equally in selecting the jury.

INSIDE THE CRIME

Mr. Taylor never wavered in proclaiming his innocence in the August 2003 crime, despite the fact that the two friends who helped him carry out the kidnapping and killing pleaded guilty in 2006.

Those friends, Joey Marshall and Sir Jack Matthews, testified against Mr. Taylor and most likely will receive life terms in prison when they are sentenced in the coming months.

Prosecutors say Mr. Taylor, with the help of Mr. Marshall and Mr. Matthews, began an identify theft scheme when he was only 17, robbing the mailboxes of wealthy homeowners in Atlanta’s upscale Buckhead neighborhood. One of their victims was Mr. Luck, a successful entrepreneur who owned a French restaurant and had a habit of not checking his mail regularly.

For a year the teens stalked Mr. Luck, prosecutors said, before deciding to rob him one day at gunpoint in the driveway of his Buckhead home. Instead of simply taking his cash and running, though, prosecutors say Mr. Taylor led the charge to kidnap the victim and drive him across the Tennessee state line to a secluded Collegedale road before shooting him in the mouth.

The crime was all based on the suspicion that Mr. Luck had caught on to their scheme and was talking to Atlanta police about it, according to testimony.

Mr. Taylor’s brother, John Taylor, expressed anger at his brother’s sentence Tuesday and also proclaimed that they would fight both the guilty verdict and the death sentence.

“There’s no justice in the death penalty, period,” Mr. Taylor said as his mother and sister sat in their vehicle on Georgia Avenue, preparing to drive back to Atlanta.

“It’s tragic for both families,” Mr. Taylor said. “It’s a loss on both our parts.”