In the wake of a police killing near St. Louis that created a national firestorm, Wesley Bell 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. Cori Bush, a member of “the Squad” in Washington.
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 Rolling Stone. Progressives, he says, thought they had elected someone who “really understood [the] Black fight against mass incarceration.”
Instead, Milton says bluntly: “Wesley did not meet the promises of a progressive prosecutor.”
Criminal justice reform advocates in St. Louis are particularly disappointed with Bell’s record on death penalty 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 vacate one death penalty conviction, 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. In that race, Bell unseated Bob McCulloch, the county’s longtime prosecuting attorney, who infamously refused to indict the police officer who killed Michael Brown, an unarmed, Black teenager, in Ferguson.
McCulloch was known for frequently seeking death sentences. Bell, by contrast, said during his 2018 campaign that he wanted to “end the death penalty.” His campaign platform noted that “capital punishment is expensive, ineffective at deterrence, and is also racially biased,” and pointed out that several prisoners on death row in Missouri had been exonerated.
Speaking at a 2018 campaign forum with two wrongfully-convicted and exonerated former death-row inmates, Bell pledged to open and review existing death penalty cases. Four years later, Bell signed onto a joint statement with progressive prosecutors in which they promised “to work to remedy past cases that resulted in unjust capital sentences.” The prosecutors wrote, “We will also support efforts to overturn existing death sentences in cases that feature a colorable claim of innocence, racial bias, egregiously inadequate or negligent defense counsel, discovery violations, or other misconduct that render us unable to stand by the sentence in good faith.”
“This,” the prosecutors declared, “is the bare minimum that justice demands of us.”
This year, Bell intervened in a death penalty case involving Marcellus Williams, after forensic evidence identified a different man’s DNA on the knife used in a 2001 murder. The St. Louis County Circuit Court will hear evidence of Williams’ innocence later this month. Williams is scheduled to be executed on September 24.
But, as a group of racial justice organizations detailed in a recent report reviewing Bell’s record as the county prosecutor, he declined to intervene in other death penalty cases that resulted in executions. The report, which Milton helped author, notes that Bell “has not sought to impose the death penalty while in office,” but it finds Bell “has failed to use his powers to the fullest extent permissible.”
Bell’s campaign manager Jordan Blase Sanders questioned the timing of the report, telling Rolling Stone that it “was released less than three weeks before the primary,” and that it was “created by a coalition that includes organizations and individuals who publicly support Congresswoman Bush’s campaign.” She adds, “It’s sad to see this obvious attempt to politicize the important work of reforming our criminal justice system, but St. Louisans know better and understand that Wesley Bell has an impressive track record of delivering progressive results.”
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.”
According to The Intercept, the key witness in the case, Taylor’s brother, recanted his testimony and accused the police of coercion. The medical examiner in the case significantly changed his estimate of the time of death, a revision that supported the police’s narrative and discounted the fact that several witnesses reported speaking to the girlfriend after Taylor had left the state, traveling to California where he met his 13-year-old daughter, Deja, for the first time. That trip, according to the prosecution’s timeline, took place after Taylor’s girlfriend’s death, but Deja recalled she spoke on the phone with her and one of her kids.
On Feb. 3, 2023, Deja Taylor flew out to St. Louis with the expectation she and the director of the Midwest Innocence Project were meeting with Bell to discuss her father’s alibi and innocence claim. Bell was not there to meet with her.
“The people that did talk to me didn’t care what I had to say,” Deja Taylor tells Rolling Stone. “It wasn’t like it was taken into perspective. They had it in their minds that they were going to execute my dad, and that was final.” (A spokesperson for Bell told The Intercept that she had not provided “probative evidence” the office could evaluate.)
Bell’s office said in a statement before the meeting with her that it would not file a motion to challenge Raheem Taylor’s conviction, asserting that “the facts are not there to support a credible case of innocence.” His office separately told the Missouri Supreme Court it would support Taylor’s request to delay his execution, so that the inmate’s lawyers could further investigate questions that had been raised about the victims’ time of death.
Raheem Taylor was executed on Feb. 7, 2023. The Innocence Project says “a full investigation of his innocence claim was never conducted.”
Speaking about how Bell’s office handled the case, Milton says, “We’re just disappointed by how he responded to it — a Black man was killed by the state, and he could have stopped it. And he chose not to stop it.”
Considering Bell’s overall record, Milton says: “He just did not meet the need of a progressive prosecutor.”