Missouri Net
January 26, 2014
The state Supreme Court has set an execution date for Michael Taylor, one of two men who pleaded guilty to the 1989 murder of a 15-year-old girl. The Court has ordered that he be executed February 26.
Taylor and Roderick Nunley both admitted to abducting Ann Harrison from the Kansas City bus stop where she was waiting to go to school. Taylor had raped the girl with Nunley’s help in the basement of Nunley’s mother’s home before fatally stabbing her and abandoning her body in the trunk of a car.
Taylor turns 47 January 30.
Nunley is also sentenced to death. The Court in December ordered attorneys for Nunley, Taylor and two other condemned men, Jeffrey Ferguson and David Barnett, to present their arguments why it should not set dates for their executions. Taylor is the first of those four to have such a date set. The Corrections Department is set to carry out its next execution Wednesday. Herbert Smulls is 56 and has been on death row for 21 years. He was sentenced to death in 1991 for the fatal shooting of Stephen Honickman, a St. Louis County jewelry store owner.Taylor was to have been executed February 1, 2006, but it was halted while the Supreme Court considered the constitutionality of lethal injection. The Court denied his appeal in 2008.