The Missouri congressional candidate campaigned for county prosecutor as a reformer, but he let several death penalty cases proceed unchallenged.
campaigned as a reformer and defeated a conservative Democrat to become the city’s prosecuting attorney. Six years later, some local progressive advocates are not happy with Bell — and not just because he is now running to take down Rep.Mike Milton says he organized, knocked doors, sent text messages in support of Bell’s 2018 campaign. “We’re disappointed,” Milton, executive director of the Freedom Community Center, a group focused on restorative justice, tells.
cases. As a candidate for St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney, Bell pledged to never seek the death penalty — a promise he’s kept. But Bell also pledged to open and review old death penalty cases, and while he fought this year to, he allowed several controversial executions to proceed unopposed in the past two years — failing, in one case, to meet with a condemned man’s daughter, as she sought to offer her own first-person testimony and convince him to challenge her father’s conviction.
“There were several situations where he could have done more on cases, but he chose the politically safe route,” says Milton. On Tuesday, Bell could unseat Bush, a progressive lawmaker, thanks in part to $12 million in outside spending by Super PACs for pro-Israel and cryptocurrency interests. In 2018, Bell won as part of a movement to elect progressive prosecutors, with support from Real Justice PAC and Democracy for America.
One of the cases that Bell declined to challenge was particularly controversial: Leonard “Raheem” Taylor was convicted of murdering his girlfriend and her children in 2004. The report says that Bell’s office “refused to intervene” in Taylor’s case “even after evidence and witnesses placed him nearly 2,000 miles from the scene of the crime.” , the key witness in the case, Taylor’s brother, recanted his testimony and accused the police of coercion.
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