Mississippi: longtime family pastor given temporary custody of a boy convicted of sexually battering him
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Material that narrows or disputes the record
Appellate history
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Mississippi Court of Appeals affirmed the convictions and sentences on March 31, 2026.
Record class
Core record
Evidence status
Convicted
Authority role
longtime pastor to the victim's mother; music teacher
Organization
No organization assigned
Archive classification
This is the archive's application of its published inclusion test. The cited record appears below.
Hazel entrusted her son to Taylor specifically because he was her longtime pastor whom she trusted 'wholeheartedly'; Taylor was not a relative of Hazel or Brian, and the custodial arrangement arose directly from the pastoral relationship.
- Pastoral or clerical authority
Evidence structure
Proceedings
Date in cited record · jury verdict and sentence
Rankin County Circuit Court, Mississippi. A jury convicted Samuel Taylor of sexual battery of Brian, a boy whose mother, Hazel, had known Taylor as her pastor since childhood and had given him temporary custody of her son while she found housing.
2026-03-31 · direct appeal
Mississippi Court of Appeals. Convictions and sentences affirmed.
Documented coercion mechanisms
- victim's mother entrusted temporary custody of her son to her longtime pastor, whom she said she 'could trust wholeheartedly'
- housed the child in his own home under a pastoral-custodial arrangement
Cited record
Sources
- official court judgment appellate judgment Taylor v. State, No. 2023-KA-00331-COA (Miss. Ct. App. Mar. 31, 2026).
Appellate opinion affirming Samuel Taylor's convictions for sexual battery of a child placed in his temporary custody by the child's mother, who had known Taylor as her pastor since her own childhood.
Source provenance
Source access and integrity log
This log records source retrieval and file integrity. It does not mean that an automated process independently confirmed every statement in the source.
- Source and tier basis
- https://storage.courtlistener.com/pdf/2026/03/31/samuel_lamar_taylor_aka_samuel_taylor_v._state_of_mississippi.pdf Corpus classification: official-court-judgment; evidentiary role: appellate-judgment. SHA-256 af4845c832e4401c3f7bee62724e0da7429746af0200bc77590fd1e1230bb77a
- Retrieval
- 2026-07-20 · Preserved
- Bound by Fear automated source-preservation ledger
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Related record
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