Plea deal in 1981 Turney stabbing gives killer life sentence
Defense says man who stabbed prison guard is mentally ill

By MITCHELL KLINE • June 4, 2008

FRANKLIN — Richard C. Taylor has been convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to death twice, but prosecutors said over the course of 26 years it became clear he was never going to be executed.

On Tuesday, Taylor, 47, thanked Williamson County Circuit Court Judge R.E. Lee Davies for approving a plea agreement that puts him behind bars for the rest of his life. Taylor pleaded guilty to the murder of Ronald Moore, a guard at the Turney Center, a prison facility in Hickman County. Prosecutors said Taylor stabbed Moore with a sharp object on Aug. 29, 1981.

Taylor was first convicted and sentenced to death in 1984 by a jury in Hickman County. That conviction was overturned when a higher court ruled Taylor's attorney had been ineffective at trial. The case was transferred to Williamson County, where in 2003 a jury again convicted him of first-degree murder and sentenced him to death. Taylor represented himself in that trial, which became grounds for the state's Court of Appeals to overturn the conviction.

"It became clear to me that for whatever reason Richard Taylor will never be executed," Deputy District Attorney Derek Smith said. "Our office decided that it would be in the best interest of the taxpayers to spend the hundreds of thousands of dollars it would cost to retry this case in other prosecutions."

Court officials said it would be hard to estimate how much money has been spent on the two trials and appeals.

Taylor's attorneys, and lawyers who have represented him in the past, said he should never have been considered a candidate for capital punishment. Taylor's sanity has been called into question several times. Mental health experts have gone back and forth on whether he was competent to stand trial.

Brad MacLean, who was Taylor's attorney from 1990 to 1999, called him an "intelligent man" who suffers from "severe mental illness." MacLean said Taylor had been "tortured" by a guard before he killed Moore.

"I think we've finally got a resolution in this case that is fair and just after 27 years," MacLean said. "It's been a long road. Finally the fact of his mental illness has been taken into consideration as it should have been from the beginning."

Smith called the questioning of Taylor's sanity "absurd."

"If we felt his mental limitations precluded him from execution we would have never sought the death penalty," Smith said. "There's something mentally off about anybody who would murder someone in cold blood. That doesn't mean they are insane."

Cassandra Stubbs, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union who helped broker the plea deal, said every lawyer who worked on the case felt Taylor should not be executed. Four of Taylor's previous attorneys agreed.

Taylor has been in custody at the Lois M. DeBerry Special Needs Facility in Nashville. Stubbs said it's unclear whether he'll remain there.

Contact Mitchell Kline at 771-5417 or mkline@tennessean.com.

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