CALIFORNIA (USA): FREDDIE TAYLOR, 58, BLACK, FREED FROM DEATH ROW NEARLY 33 YEARS AFTER CONVICTION

February 25, 2019:

A man who spent nearly 33 years awaiting execution on California’s death row took his first steps as a free man on 20 February 2019, following an appeals court decision that overturned the death sentence and raised questions about his mental state during trial.
At age 25, Freddie Taylor was convicted for the Jan. 22, 1985 murder of an 84-year-old widow, Carmen Carlos Vasquez, who was brutally raped and beaten to death inside of her Richmond home. For years, Taylor filed legal motions asking for a new trial on the grounds that the court had ignored obvious indications he was incompetent to stand trial. Taylor had a lifelong history of mental illness, along with diagnoses of paranoid schizophrenia, brain damage and borderline personality disorder. Taylor was denied a new trial by state courts. But in 2016, a federal judge ruled in his favor, in a decision affirmed by the Ninth Circuit on December 31, 2018.
The appeals court affirmed the 2016 decision, ruling there was insufficient evidence on the record to retroactively assess Taylor’s mental health at the time. From there, Contra Costa prosecutors had 60 days to decide if they wanted to retry Taylor. Instead, they offered him the deal.
On 20 February, prosecutors offered Taylor freedom, agreeing to a plea deal that would reduce his sentence to time served in exchange for pleading guilty to a manslaughter charge.
Taylor, now 58, was released from jail on 20 February afternoon.
At the time of the murder, Taylor was identified as a suspect after his fingerprints were found on a door and a plexiglass window. But Taylor had burglarized Vasquez’s home days earlier, which gave him a plausible explanation for why fingerprints were at the scene.
Jurors are instructed during trial that if there are two reasonable theories behind the evidence, and one points to innocence, they must adopt it rather than convict the defendant. That, along with the lack of DNA and the fact that several police witnesses had died, weakened the prosecution’s case for a retrial.