In wakefulness After a police officer’s killing near St. Louis sparked a national storm, Wesley Bell ran as a reformer and defeated a conservative Democrat to become the city’s district attorney. Six years later, some local progressives are not happy with Bell—and not just because he is now running to unseat Rep. Cori Bush, a member of the “Squad” in Washington.
Mike Melton says he organized Bell’s campaign in 2018, knocking on doors and sending text messages in support. “We’re disappointed,” says Melton, executive director of the Freedom Community Center, a group focused on restorative justice. rolling stoneHe says progressives thought they had elected someone who “really understood [the] “Black Struggle Against Mass Incarceration.”
Instead, Milton says bluntly, “Wesley did not deliver on the promises of a progressive attorney general.”
Criminal justice reform advocates in St. Louis are particularly disappointed with Bell’s record on death penalty issues. As a candidate for St. Louis district attorney, Bell pledged never to seek the death penalty—a promise he has kept. But Bell has also pledged to reopen and review old death penalty cases, and while he fought to overturn a death sentence this year, he has allowed several controversial executions to go ahead without opposition in the past two years—in one case failing to meet with the daughter of a man on death row when she sought to testify in person and persuade him to challenge her father’s conviction.
“There were several situations where he could have done more on issues, but he chose the safe political path,” Milton says.
On Tuesday, Bell was able to unseat Bush, a progressive lawmaker, thanks to $12 million in outside spending by independent political action committees to benefit pro-Israel and cryptocurrency interests. In 2018, Bell won as part of a movement to elect progressive prosecutors, backed by the Committee for Real Justice and Democracy in America. In that race, Bell unseated Bob McCulloch, the longtime district attorney who infamously refused to charge the police officer who killed Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager, in Ferguson.
McCulloch was known for his frequent calls for the death penalty. By contrast, Bell said during his 2018 campaign that he wanted to “end the death penalty.” His campaign platform noted that “the death penalty is costly, ineffective as a deterrent, and racially biased,” and pointed to the exoneration of several death row inmates in Missouri.
Speaking at a 2018 campaign forum with two former wrongfully convicted and exonerated death row inmates, Bell pledged to open and review existing death penalty cases. Four years later, Bell signed a joint statement with progressive prosecutors promising to “work to address past cases that resulted in wrongful death sentences.” “We will also support efforts to overturn existing death sentences in cases characterized by clear claims of innocence, racial bias, incompetent or grossly negligent defense counsel, disclosure violations, or other misconduct that renders us unable to stand by the verdict in good faith,” the prosecutors wrote.
“This is the minimum that justice demands of us,” prosecutors declared.
This year, Bell intervened in the death penalty case involving Marsellus Williams, after forensic evidence identified another man’s DNA on the knife used in a 2001 murder. A St. Louis County court will hear evidence of Williams’ exoneration later this month. Williams is scheduled to be executed Sept. 24.
But as a group of racial justice organizations explained in a recent report examining Bell’s record as district attorney, he declined to intervene in other death penalty cases that resulted in executions. The report, which Melton helped author, notes that Bell “did not seek to impose the death penalty while in office,” but finds that Bell “failed to use his authority to the fullest extent permissible.”
Bill's campaign manager, Jordan Blaze Sanders, questioned the timing of the report, saying: rolling stone “This book was released less than three weeks before the primary election, and it was created by a coalition of organizations and individuals who openly support Rep. Bush’s campaign,” Ms. Leslie Bell said in an interview with The New York Times. “It’s sad to see this apparent attempt to politicize the important work of reforming our criminal justice system, but the people of St. Louis know and understand that Wesley Bell has a proven track record of achieving progressive results.”
One case that Bell declined to contest was particularly controversial: Leonard “Raheem” Taylor was convicted of killing his girlfriend and her children in 2004. The report says Bell’s office “refused to intervene” in Taylor’s case “even after evidence and witnesses placed him nearly 2,000 miles from the crime scene.”
According to The Intercept, the key witness in the case, Taylor’s brother, recanted his testimony and accused police of coercion. The medical examiner in the case also dramatically changed his estimate of the time of death, an adjustment that supported the police account and ignored the fact that several witnesses reported speaking to his girlfriend after Taylor left the state and traveled to California, where he met his 13-year-old daughter, Deja, for the first time. According to the prosecution’s timeline, that trip occurred after Taylor’s girlfriend died, but Deja recalled speaking on the phone with her and one of her children.
On February 3, 2023, Deja Taylor traveled to St. Louis hoping that she and the director of the Midwest Innocence Project would meet with Bell to discuss her father's claim of innocence. Bell was not there to meet with her.
“The people who talked to me didn't care what I had to say,” says Deja Taylor. rolling stone“It wasn’t like they took it seriously. They thought they were going to execute my father, and that was the final decision.” (A spokesperson for Bell told The Intercept that she had not provided “corroborative evidence” that the bureau could evaluate.)
Bell’s office said in a statement before meeting with her that it would not file a motion to appeal Raheem Taylor’s conviction, saying “the facts are insufficient to support a credible case of innocence.” His office separately told the Missouri Supreme Court that it would support Taylor’s request to delay his execution so that the inmate’s attorneys could further investigate questions raised about the victims’ time of death.
Raheem Taylor was executed on February 7, 2023. The Innocence Project says “his claim of innocence has never been fully investigated.”
Speaking about how Bell's office handled the case, Melton said: “We are disappointed in the way he responded to the case – a black man was killed by the state, and he could have prevented it. But he chose not to prevent it.”
Given Bell's overall record, Melton says, “he didn't meet the needs of a progressive attorney general.”
