EUGENE, Ore. (AP) - Jurors deciding whether two-time convicted murderer David Ray Taylor should be sentenced to death spent much of their conversation on one question: Would he commit future violence?
Jury foreman Ron Crawford said the panel concluded that sending the 58-year-old Taylor to death row was the only way to keep others safe.
“His threat to the other inmates, the (prison) staff and visitors was a very real deal,” Crawford told The Register-Guard newspaper (https://is.gd/4hOSl3 ).
The seven-woman, five-man jury ruled Thursday that Taylor should be sentenced to death, after previously convicting him of robbing two banks and killing 22-year-old Eugene resident Celestino Gutierrez Jr. in 2012. Taylor previously served 27 years for the killing of a young Eugene woman in 1977.
Taylor will be officially sentenced Tuesday. He will join 33 other men and one woman on Oregon’s death row. Just two inmates have been executed since Oregonians reinstated capital punishment in 1984.
Crawford said the testimony from three state prison inmates who appeared as character witnesses for the defense “probably did (Taylor) more harm than good.”
The inmates all know Taylor from his previous prison term, and spoke highly of him in court. But they also testified that Taylor, because of his criminal history, might return to the penitentiary with some measure of status. Prosecutors said his position in the prison hierarchy could allow him to influence other inmates to commit violence.
“Because he’d be higher in the pecking order, it sounded like he’d have a fairly decent life in prison,” Crawford said.
Prosecutors said the killing of Gutierrez was done at Taylor’s home, and he planned it along with younger associates, one of whom posed as a stranded woman in a bar parking lot and asked Gutierrez for a ride.
After Gutierrez was killed, his body was dismembered and buried in a forest southwest of Eugene.
Crawford praised the work of prosecutors and said Taylor’s attorneys had a difficult job, considering that trial evidence left little question regarding Taylor’s guilt.
“I think the defense did what they could to establish reasonable doubt, and that was an impossible task,” Crawford said. “We looked for reasonable doubt, and we found none.”
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Information from: The Register-Guard, https://www.registerguard.com
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