Convicted molester will ask Supreme Court to rule on appeal

The Lebanon Reporter - 2/28/2017

Feb. 28--Lawyers on Thursday will ask the Indiana Supreme Court to accept an appeal from a man who was convicted in 2011 of child molesting.

William Taylor was sentenced to 80 years in prison, a sentence that was upheld on appeal.

Now he is asking that his Boone County conviction on two class A felonies be overturned and he be allowed to plead guilty to a single class B felony, which has a maximum sentence of 20 years.

Taylor is claiming that his defense was ineffective because his lawyer failed to tell him of a plea agreement in Boone County.

An original charge of class B felony child molesting was amended to two class A felonies on Jan. 28, 2011. A Circuit Court jury convicted him on both counts; on April 4, 2011, he was sentenced to 80 years in prison. The Indiana Court of Appeals upheld that verdict.

In October 2012, Taylor sought post-conviction relief, but that petition was denied in October 2015.

Taylor began molesting a child in 1999, when the victim was between 5 and 8 years old, according to court documents. The assaults happened several times a week at the victim's home in Boone County; Taylor lived in Brownsburg.

Following an interview of the victim at a child advocacy center, during a telephone call monitored by Boone County and Indiana State Police detectives, Taylor said to the victim, "I'll go to prison for the rest of my life now ... I don't know why I did it, started anything with you." Detectives arrested Taylor at his home later that day.

Taylor was charged with two class A, four class B, three class C and one class D felonies in Hendricks County.

Taylor was represented by Alan Lidy of Roscoe Stovall, Jr. and Associates.

In a brief asking the Supreme Court to take the case, Taylor argues that Lidy did not tell him of a Boone County offer to accept a 20-year sentence for pleading guilty to a class B felony. There were legal and technical reasons for not accepting the offer, according to Taylor's Supreme Court brief, but Taylor didn't know of the plea bargain until it was mentioned at a Jan. 26, 2011, pretrial conference. Two days later, Boone County upgraded the charges to class A felonies.

"Because of the complicated and conjoined nature of the two pending cases in different counties, this situation was different than a standard guilty plea, and the trial court may have been reluctant to accept this guilty plea without a resolution in the Hendricks County case," wrote Indiana Deputy Attorney General Jodi Kathryn Stein in an April 2016 brief to the Indiana Court of Appeals.

Stein noted that Taylor had rejected a Hendricks County offer of a 45-year sentence in exchange for pleading guilty to class A child molesting, while facing a possible 207 years if convicted on all counts.

"It is reasonable to infer that (Taylor) received the generous plea offer in Hendricks County because he had been convicted in Boone County of two class A felony offenses and received an 80-year sentence," Stein wrote.

Stephen T. Owens, a public defender representing Taylor in the transfer appeal, said Taylor "was prejudiced by trial counsel's deficient performance. The evidence in the case leads unerringly and unmistakably to a decision opposite that reached by the post-conviction court."

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