The judge who decided John Albert Taylor should die for the rape and murder of an 11-year-old girl said he has no regrets about ordering the death penalty.
Former 2nd District Judge David Roth, now a senior judge, presided over Taylor's trial and convicted him of capital murder for the slaying of Charla Nicole King. Taylor continually maintained his innocence but admitted he was in the apartment the day she was killed. He said, however, that he was alone and was there only to commit a burglary.He was executed by firing squad early Friday.
Roth, who spoke on condition that a story only be printed after the execution took place, said Taylor's fingerprints found inside the apartment was the factor that most convinced him of Taylor's guilt.
"Clearly the fingerprint on the telephone was a key piece of evidence, and without the fingerprint there wouldn't have been a case," the judge said.
Roth said aggravating circumstances outweighed mitigating circumstances during the December 1989 trial, so he sentenced Taylor to die as the law requires. Roth said testimony revealed that the crime was "brutal" - the young girl had been raped and sodomized and a telephone cord was wrapped around her neck.
The judge said that the death sentence was appropriate in this case because of Taylor's past criminal record. The judge said that Taylor had been in a mental hospital for three years for sex offenses and that he had served about 10 years in prison for burglary.
Roth also said he didn't realize then that he was the first judge to impose the death sentence in Weber County in 40 years. "It (40 years) wasn't important to me," he said.
Ray Dempsey Gardner was the last person ordered to die in Weber County. In 1949, he murdered 17-year-old Shirley Gertzinger. The 28-year-old faced the firing squad on Sept. 29, 1951.
Pierre Dale Selby and William Andrews were the last two men sentenced to die for crimes committed at Ogden's Hi Fi Shop. That case, however, was moved to Davis County because of pretrial publicity, and a jury there convicted both men and sentenced both of them to die.
Both men were executed by lethal injection.
Last week, the Catholic Church in Rome issued a statement opposing Taylor's death. Roth said such statements don't carry any weight with him because he believes any judge or jury would have come to the same conclusion that he did.
"I'm bound to enforce the rules," noted the judge. "My work in that case wasn't extraordinary."