Facing Life in Prison Based on Shoddy Evidence, a Florida Mother Makes a Deal

Two months before she was supposed to go on trial for killing her child, Michelle Taylor stood before a Florida judge and listened quietly as the prosecutor recited the allegations against her. Taylor, 41, had long insisted she was not what the state made her out to be: a mother who set fire to her home to collect insurance money, killing her 11-year-old son David in the process. Now there was proof she’d been telling the truth. The key arson evidence had been dismantled, with several top scientists saying that the forensics did not hold up.
But prosecutors refused to drop the charges, instead giving Taylor’s lawyer a deadline. According to defense attorney John Rockwell, if she did not take a plea deal by her next court hearing, all future offers were off the table. After several sleepless nights, Taylor walked into the St. Johns County Courthouse on April 2 and entered a plea: no contest to manslaughter.
“She was up there for maybe three minutes,” said Megan Wallace, Taylor’s fiercest advocate, who watched in the gallery alongside Taylor’s mother. Six-and-a-half years after the fire destroyed Taylor’s home and upended her life, the conviction happened in the blink of an eye.
I examined Taylor’s case in an in-depth story published by The Intercept last month. It described how she was accused of arson after escaping a nighttime fire that broke out in her St. Augustine home on October 23, 2018. Witnesses described her panic as she screamed that her son was inside, trying repeatedly to reenter the house. Taylor swore she had no idea how the fire started or why David did not make it out. The two had been watching TV in her bedroom that night, Taylor told investigators, when she heard smoke detectors go off and encountered thick black smoke outside her door. She and her 18-year-old daughter Bailey escaped through a window, Taylor said, but David turned to look for the family dog and never emerged.
Authorities became suspicious after an accelerant-detecting canine alerted in different parts of the house, prompting investigators to collect five fire debris samples from the scene. The samples were sent to the State Fire Marshal’s Bureau of Forensic Services lab, which reported three of them positive for gasoline. Subsequent samples also revealed gasoline, according to the lab — proof positive of arson. Detectives also found red flags in Taylor’s financial history, pointing to a possible motive, including evidence that she and her husband were behind in their mortgage and that she had fraudulently solicited donations from area churches.
But the gasoline was the only direct evidence of arson — and eventually that evidence began to fall apart. Veteran fire scientist John Lentini first raised alarm in January 2024, writing in a defense report that the gasoline findings were based on a misinterpretation of chromatographic data from a state lab that “routinely identified gasoline where it does not exist.” Lentini, who had filed a complaint against the lab nearly a decade earlier, leading to a temporary suspension of its professional accreditation, said it was the sixth case he had seen in which a person was falsely accused of arson based on the lab’s faulty gasoline analysis.
It was the sixth case he had seen in which a person was falsely accused of arson based on the lab’s faulty gasoline analysis.
Lentini’s report was shared with the state’s lead fire investigator, a special agent with the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, who immediately emailed it to two ATF chemists. During depositions in April 2024, those experts agreed that the data shown in his report did not show evidence of gasoline. As the case approached trial, two more forensic chemists reexamined the evidence. One looked at the lab data; another, veteran chemist Laurel Mason of Analytical Forensic Associates, examined the carbon strips used to test the fire debris samples in 2018. Like Lentini, those experts concluded that there was no evidence of gasoline.
Rockwell, a private defense attorney in Jacksonville who started representing Taylor last year, had just disclosed Mason’s analysis of the carbon strips in February when prosecutors revealed a new report of their own. The chemist who tested the fire debris samples in 2018 issued an amended lab report in the case, backtracking on her earlier findings. Of the three positive samples that first set the case into motion, only one actually contained gasoline, she wrote. In total, four fire debris samples she first said contained gasoline were changed to report no evidence of an accelerant.
Rockwell, a former prosecutor, described the amended report as “mind-blowing.” As he wrote in a subsequent court filing, the state’s report “appears to have been suspiciously back-dated” to January, to make it look like it was submitted before Mason’s expert report — a hasty attempt to rehabilitate the state’s forensic evidence in the face of his experts’ findings. “I’ve never seen that in any case in my life,” he told me.
But Rockwell also knew the danger Taylor faced if she went to trial. Although the discredited evidence severely undermined the case the state hoped to present to the jury, prosecutors did not actually have to prove how the fire started in order to win a conviction. They only had to convince jurors that Taylor had committed arson in order to collect insurance money, which they planned to do by relying on circumstantial evidence of fraud. In Florida, a guilty verdict on a first-degree felony murder charge means a mandatory life sentence. Rockwell pursued what he believed to be the least risky option for his client, negotiating the best deal possible, then convincing her to take it.
“They’re still doing the exact same thing. Without any punishment or sanctions or anything. And that’s horrifying. Because that can affect somebody for the rest of their life.”
On the morning of the hearing, Rockwell met Taylor, her mother, and Wallace at the courthouse in St. Augustine, where he went over the plea deal one more time. In exchange for the no-contest plea, the state had agreed to drop the arson charge at Taylor’s sentencing, which was scheduled for May 30. Seventh Judicial Circuit Court Judge Lee Smith would then have a range of sentencing options, from three to 13 years. With credit for the nearly three years Taylor spent in the local jail, Taylor could serve as little as a few months in prison.
Michelle Taylor, right, after a hearing at the St. Johns County Courthouse in St. Augustine, Fla., on July 9, 2024. Liliana Segura
“I think she made the right decision,” Rockwell told me, reemphasizing that Taylor maintains her innocence. Now he plans to present his experts’ opinions at the sentencing hearing, where he will address the flawed forensics, the amended report, and the disturbing history of the state fire marshal’s lab. “They’re still doing the exact same thing,” he said. “Without any punishment or sanctions or anything. And that’s horrifying. Because that can affect somebody for the rest of their life.”
In an email, Bryan Shorstein, executive director of the Seventh Judicial Circuit state attorney’s office, declined to comment about the plea deal “since it is still an active case.”
A spokesperson representing the fire marshal’s office declined to comment.
A week after the court hearing, Wallace accompanied Taylor to the local Dollar Tree to buy Easter supplies for Taylor’s nieces and for Wallace’s daughter. In a text, Wallace sent a photo: a neat row of pastel baskets placed high on a closet shelf, with candy and bunny ears peeking over the side.
The holidays have been painful for Taylor, who has been out on bond for almost a year. As the sentencing approaches, she worries about her mother and one of her sisters, both of whom have terminal cancer, according to Wallace. Even a short prison sentence could keep her away from them when they need her most. Meanwhile, on Facebook, a local news story about the plea deal put Taylor’s mugshot back in circulation, along with outraged comments calling her a murderer who is getting off easy.
But for now Taylor can’t worry about what other people think, only about her sentencing, where she will finally speak for herself. She is trying to hold onto hope that the judge, who has presided over her case for years, sees the case clearly. “In her mind,” Wallace said, “she thinks that Judge Smith knows she’s innocent.”