N. Carolina crime lab withheld test results in more than 200 cases
Greg Taylor's case was one of more than 230 in which an auditor found significant problems.
On September 25, 1991, Greg Taylor was looking to get high. Driving though the streets of downtown Raleigh, he picked up an acquaintance, Johnny Beck, who helped him score the drugs. What happened next would cost Taylor 17 years of his life.
The two men drove to a field off of a remote cul-de-sac to get high. While smoking, "the urge kind of hit me, you know, to -- to spin around in the mud a little bit on the way out," Taylor said recently, "I basically went across the path and might have made it 10 feet before I bottomed out in a ditch."
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With the car stuck in mud, Taylor and Beck walked toward the main road when something caught their attention. It was the body of Jacquetta Thomas, a local prostitute who had been brutally beaten and murdered.
The men were afraid to report the crime. "We had drugs on our person. I was driving without a license, had been consuming alcohol, and so there's a litany of reasons that I would not want to talk to police in general," Taylor said.
The next day, when Taylor and his then-wife, Becky, went to pick up his car, police had already taped off the crime scene. Taylor volunteered to tell the police what he knew. "[It] just still never occurred to him that they might be looking at him," Becky said.
Taylor voluntarily went to the police station for questioning, gave police the clothing he wore the night before and offered to take a lie-detector test. That afternoon, he and Beck were arrested for the murder of Thomas.
Police pressured Taylor to implicate Beck, but Taylor consistently maintained they were both innocent.
Taylor and his family believed the trial would vindicate him. His attorney told Becky it was "the weakest case he had ever seen in his entire career. He was really confident that they could get it dismissed. And so he wasn't gonna present any evidence."
But the prosecutor presented overwhelming evidence, including damning lab results indicating there were "chemical indications for the presence of blood" on Taylor's truck. He was convicted, and sentenced to life in prison.
"When you walk in that courtroom, you still have a belief that the truth will prevail," Taylor said, "but after about three to four days of listening to the prosecutor's case, realizing that the truth is not even being heard, you start to question that. When that verdict came down, it was definitely a shock."
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