DATE: Thursday, July 17, 1997               TAG: 9707170478

SECTION: LOCAL                   PAGE: B3   EDITION: NORTH CAROLINA 

SOURCE: ASSOCIATED PRERSS 

DATELINE: WINSTON-SALEM                     LENGTH:   58 lines

MOORE BEGINS NEW ROUND OF DEATH-ROW APPEALS NEXT WEEK

An attorney for death row inmate Blanche Taylor Moore will take a different tack next week when they argue the woman convicted of poisoning her boyfriend should get a new trial.

William Taylor will return to a Forsyth County courtroom Monday for a new round of appeals in her case.

The appeal will not challenge the conviction but rather the way the trial was conducted, citing allegations against the prosecutor, Moore's trial attorney and the presiding judge.

Moore was convicted in the 1986 death of boyfriend Raymond Reid of Kernersville. The case was broken when doctors determined in 1989 that Moore's husband at that time, the Rev. Dwight Moore, was suffering from arsenic poisoning. He did not die.

Investigators exhumed Reid's body and also the body of Moore's first husband, James N. Taylor, and determined both had died from arsenic poisoning. Authorities charged Moore with two counts of murder and assault on Dwight Moore. The district attorney dropped the assault charge and the second murder charge after a judge sentenced Moore to death for Reid's murder.

Briefs filed by attorney Taylor claim prosecutor Janet Branch was having an affair at the time of the trial with the lead State Bureau of Investigation agent in the case.

It also says Branch was negotiating with Lorimar Productions for the rights to a TV movie during the trial. She also knew two jurors who did business with her husband, the brief says.

The N.C. State Bar found that Branch had talked to representatives of Lorimar during the trial but did not negotiate. She was reprimanded in 1993.

Taylor's brief says that one of Moore's attorney's, David Tamer, also was negotiating his own deal with producers. It also says that Tamer was suffering from depression and didn't defend Moore as well as he should have.

Tamer's law license was suspended for at least three years in 1994. The State Bar found that he lied to clients, neglected their cases and kept fees for services that he did not perform.

The brief also says that Judge William H. Freeman went into the jury room for birthday cake and handfuls of popcorn and talked to jurors between snacks.

Prosecutor Vincent Rabil will argue against a new trial for Moore and ask Judge William Wood to apply new state and federal laws that would cut this round of appeals in half to about two years.

Moore's first round of appeals for the conviction ended in 1994 when the U.S. Supreme Court refused to review her conviction.

A made-for-TV movie, ``The Black Widow Murders: the Blanche Taylor Moore Story'' was aired in 1993. ILLUSTRATION: Photo

ASSOCIATED PRESS/File

Attorney David Tamer stood by Blanche Taylor Moore as she was

sentenced to death in 1990 for murdering her boyfriend. KEYWORDS: MURDER POISONING DEATH ROW CAPITAL PUNISHMENT

APPEAL NORTH CAROLINA

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