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The
Trial of Ronald Taylor
by Judy Chestnut and Rocky Krivijanski
Goto
Trial vs. Sentencing | Victim
Impact Statements | Multiple
Murders
Carol Kroll told the jury she was waking up in the middle of the
night screaming and crying, longing to hold her husband close to
her once more.
The man she depended on for stability during 29 years of marriage
had been robbed from her life, she told an Allegheny County jury
during the murder trial of 41-year-old Ronald Taylor of Wilkinsburg
in 2001.
“Every morning I wake up missing John,” she said. “He’s
not in my bed anymore, not in my house. I can’t see him. I
can’t hug him. There’s just no way to tell you the pain
and hopelessness that I feel.”
Meanwhile, Taylor – a black man accused of killing three men
including Kroll and wounding two others because of the color of
their skin – sat emotionless in the courtroom, surrounded
by crying spectators and jurors.
Taylor’s aloof behavior is characteristic of paranoid schizophrenia,
his attorneys argued while trying to convince the jury to spare
his life.
His mental condition, however, had failed to sway influence their
decision to convict him of murder 24 hours earlier. The dawn of
a new day brought Taylor to the next phase of his trial, where the
same jury of six men and six women would determine if he would be
sentenced to death for his crimes or live the rest of his life behind
bars.
“There are numerous reasons … that this day is sad,”
said Lisa Middleman from the Public Defenders Office, one of Taylor’s
attorneys. “But one of the reasons that it is a particularly
sad day is that in this building where justice tempered with mercy
is supposed to be dispensed, we’re sentencing a seriously
mentally ill, intellectually impaired, emotionally incompetent person
to die. And there is no honor in that. There’s no human dignity
in that.”
Some legal experts have long argued that the scales of justice are
tipped in favor of the prosecution when defendants in capital punishment
cases have mental health issues.
“When a jury has to make a determination based on medical
definitions interpreted in a legal way, then there’s no way
that you can have a proper and fitting determination,” said
John Elash, the other of Taylor’s two attorneys, who argued
at the criminal phase of the trial.
When the jury cannot see any physical sign of mental illness, as
they sometimes can with mental retardation, it becomes even harder
to convince them to spare a man’s life, said William Difenderfer,
another leading Pittsburgh defense attorney. He represented Richard
Baumhammers, another racially motivated, mass murderer, who killed
four and severely wounded another just one month after Taylor’s
rampage.
“Any defendant who has normal physical features and can function
in life, it is extremely difficult to convince a jury that he didn’t
know what he was doing,” Difenderfer said.
Insanity “waxes and wanes” in the individual who suffers
from it, said Elash. “It simply isn’t a constant state.
But people don’t believe you can have temporary insanity.”
During Taylor’s trial, Dr. Horatio Fabrega Jr., a psychiatrist
who testified for the defense, said that Taylor was in a “fugue”
state when he committed the crimes. The psychological term describes
when people are in an unemotional, unresponsive amnesic condition
where they appear conscious of their actions but have no recollection
of what they did after snapping out of it.
Witnesses testified that Taylor acted cool and calm during the murders
and was capable of passing up black people in order to kill whites.
Dr. Michael Welner, the prosecution’s expert psychiatrist,
told the jury that such behavior demonstrated that Taylor was aware
of what he was doing.
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Elash believes that the current system of having one jury that determines
both the defendant’s guilt and his punishment tilts justice’s
scales in favor of the death penalty. One way to even the scales,
he said, would to have two juries for capital punishment cases.
One jury would hear the criminal phase and the other jury would
determine if the defendant receives the death penalty, should the
case get to that point.
A fresh jury at the sentencing phase, Elash argued, would not be
influenced by any evidence about mental health that had been raised
in the criminal trial. In the trial stage, the defense must argue
that the defendant is unable to judge right from wrong, a very high
burden of proof. During sentencing hearing, the mental health of
the defendant can be more loosely defined, and it works as a mitigating
factor weighing against the death penalty.
Rob Dunham, an attorney with the U.S. Public Defenders Office in
Philadelphia, said that as many as two-thirds of the defendants
in death penalty cases in Pennsylvania suffer from brain damage,
which often results in mental illness. At least 90 percent of those
on death row, including Taylor, have been abused and neglected as
children, Dunham said.
“There is actually a neuro-chemical reaction [to abuse and
neglect] that hinders certain neurological connections so that the
person actually lacks a capacity to develop sympathy, empathy and
caring,” Dunham said. “They lack behavioral strategies
to respond to stress, and they have a physiological inability to
react with sympathy.” Rather, they appear to be aloof, which
hurts their case.
Even the judge in the case seemed to think that Taylor’s lack
of emotion indicated that he was coldhearted instead of mentally
ill, as he scolded Taylor at the end of the trial for not showing
any remorse.
“You’re obviously a poor candidate for any rehabilitation,”
said Judge Lawrence J. O’Toole. “You’ve never
shown and still don’t show any remorse. Any lesser sentence
here would tend to depreciate the seriousness of the crime.”
Testimony revealed that Taylor began practicing black magic in his
teens. Taylor’s brother, Chuck, testified about a time when
Taylor was about 14 years old and they shared a bedroom. Chuck wanted
into the room, but Taylor locked him out. After hours of trying
to gain entry, Chuck discovered when Taylor opened the door that
his brother had spray painted the walls black and hung pictures
of skulls and crossbones.
The defense also offered evidence that Taylor had been physically
abused by his father, Ernest. Chuck testified that Taylor was the
victim of that abuse more frequently than any of his siblings because
he often stood up for their mother, Shirley, when their parents
were fighting. Oftentimes, his father tormented Taylor while brandishing
a gun. Taylor used that same gun during the killing spree years
later.
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Just as the defense can present mitigating circumstances of the
crime, such as Taylor’s mental illness, the state can present
the jury with aggravating circumstances, complicating factors that
make the crime more serious. In addition, the state can present
victim impact statements, such as the testimony of Carol Kroll,
who explained to the jury how her husband’s death has affected
her and their children.
“From the beginning, John was my strength. I learned to depend
on him completely. He was everything to me,” she told the
jury. “We were at a time in our lives when we could enjoy
each other, and we were looking forward to our later years together.
Ronald Taylor decided to take those years away from us. And no matter
what Miss Middleman or Mr. Elash say, I believe he knew exactly
what he was doing at the time he shot my husband.”
Such testimony is often controversial in death penalty cases.
“There’s a particular gap in Pennsylvania’s death
penalty statute, which renders the use of victim impact statements
peculiar,” said Bruce Ledewitz, a law professor at Duquesne
University who worked on the Allegheny County Death Penalty Project
from 1981 to 1994. “The statute requires the jury to weigh
aggravating and mitigating. Victim impact is not one of the aggravating
circumstances so the jury is told not to use it.”
Nonetheless, Ledewitz said, a victim’s impact statement affects
the jury emotionally.
“Shouldn’t the state tell [the jury] how to use it?”
he sasked.
Elash said the lack of direction causes confusion. For two days
during Taylor’s trial, the prosecution called to the stand
relatives of the victims, such as Carol Kroll, to recount for the
jury how the loss of their family member had hurt them emotionally,
financially and psychologically. The judge kept a box of tissues
on the bench for the families, using four boxes within the two days.
“Then the judge says to the jury, ‘You know those two
days of victim impact statements? You’re not to consider them,’”
recalled Elash. “How can you not consider two days and four
boxes of Kleenex?”
While defense lawyers such as Elash have tried to argue that victim
impact statements are unfair to the defendant, the U.S. Supreme
Court rejected that theory in the 1991 case, Payne vs. Tennessee.
At one time, the law had viewed murder as a victimless crime because
the victim was dead, but families of murder victims lobbied for
legal reform and won.
“The last people anybody cares about are people who have committed
violent crimes,” Elash said. “Victims have a more popular
lobby.”
Congress is considering a Victims’ Rights Amendment to the
U.S. Constitution, which the American Civil Liberties Union opposes
because it claims that allowing victims to voice their opinions
at every step of the prosecution undermines the court’s ability
to operate in a fair and impartial manner. The government’s
role is not to represent victims, but to seek justice against those
that break laws. Besides, opponents to the law argue, victim impact
statements imply to juries that a beloved person’s life is
worth more than that of a friendless victim.
But scenarios such as those that occurred in Taylor’s trial
are quite common in murder cases across the United States, as every
state in the nation has allowed some form of victim impact statement
since the 1991 decision. Only a few states ban victim impact statements
in death penalty cases.
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Trying to save the life of a man who has killed people becomes even
harder when the defendant is accused of multiple murders, especially
when all of the victims are innocent bystanders, such as in Taylor’s
case, Difenderfer said.
“Spree killings are one of the most difficult to defend,”
he said. “A jury wants to hear that why – over drugs,
over love, over all those types of things. When the killings don’t
make sense, when they just can’t fathom why, it’s extremely
hard for a jury.”
Taylor’s attorneys had an even more difficult time convincing
a jury to spare his life because he killed upstanding citizens,
including Kroll, an every-day family man; Joseph Healy, a former
priest; and Emil Sanielevici, a 20-year-old college physics whiz.
“Ronald Taylor shot nothing but nice people,” Elash
said.
Taylor’s crime began when John Kroll went to Taylor’s
apartment on March 1, 2000, to help two other maintenance men fix
Taylor’s apartment door. Taylor exploded with rage because
he thought the men were taking too long, and he shot and killed
Kroll. Taylor, who had been diagnosed at least 15 times as a paranoid
schizophrenic, then went on his killing spree, shooting white people
and sparing blacks. He set fire to his apartment and then walked
into Wilkinsburg’s business district to kill. After taking
three women hostage in an office, he released them and surrendered
to a police negotiator.
Crime experts classify Taylor’s actions as a spree killing
instead of a mass murder or serial murder because of the short time
frame in which he committed his crimes and the reasoning behind
his actions.
“Spree killers differ from serial killers in that the perpetrator
bears a grudge and eventually some incident … causes him to
flip and he shoots those he sees as responsible for his predicament,”
according to Tim Fields, a British author and a public speaker who
specializes in addressing “bullying.” “Sometimes,
he randomly shoots and kills people who he sees as representative
of those who have failed or rejected him.”
In Taylor’s case, the incident of a white man trying to fix
his door caused him to snap, his attorneys argued. It was the explosive
ending to a slow build-up of anger that began when he was 14 and
continued until that fateful day.
“He went to Brashear High School when it was just opening
up, and there were a lot of black-and-white fights,” Elash
said. “He wasn’t a big guy, and he probably got picked
on a lot. His psychotic view of racism progressed from the time
he was 14 to 42.”
After police arrested Taylor for the shootings, they searched his
apartment and found lists of people who he hated, which by that
time in his life, included whites, Jews, Italians and police officers.
“He was getting to the point that he thought everybody was
evil,” Elash said.
Spree killers typically have between four and five victims and kill
them over the course of days or months. They are usually white males
between the ages of 20 and 30 years old and kill their victims one
or two at a time by stabbing or shooting them. <ost, perhaps
all, suffer from some form of mental illness.
Mental Disorders
Some contend that the criminal justice system should treat those
who have mental disorders instead of sentencing them to death row.
Many who hold this belief indicate that it is society’s responsibility
to recognize mental illness in people before they commit murder.
“I don’t think we would sentence somebody with typhoid
fever who accidentally touched another person and killed them,”
Elash said, indicating that the state should not have the right
to execute those who suffer from mental illness and commit murder.
But many do not agree with that theory, as most defendants who argue
mental illness lose.
“There is hypocrisy that we give a damn about human life,”
Ledewitz said. “We don’t. We’re very happy to
execute people, and we’re not too worried about the innocent,
discrimination, or poverty.”
Even though he does not believe in capital punishment, Sergiu Sanielevici,
Emil’s father, said that he believes those who murder based
on race should receive the death penalty. He related the crime to
genocide, which he believes deserves the maximum penalty that the
law allows.
“Here, you’re attacking the fabric of society,”
Sanielevici said. “This was kind of top of the scale. If you
give the maximum penalty to anyone, this person should get it.”
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