With Leon Taylors death by lethal injection, 2014 ties 1999 for having the most executions in a year in Missouri. The execution came amid racial tension in the state over the killing of Michael Brown, an unarmed teenager, by a white police officer in Ferguson, Mo.
In a just world, Leon Taylor never would have been sentenced to death, said Diann Rust-Tierney, Executive Director of the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty (NCADP). Only through a lethal combination of racial bias, legal loopholes and prosecutorial misconduct can an African-American
