Questions loom in Alabama death-penalty case

Billy Kuenzel said he was home asleep when store clerk Linda Jean Offord was killed by a single shotgun blast on a rainy night in November 1987.

But Alabama prosecutors didn't buy Kuenzel's story and neither did a jury, which convicted him and then sent him to death row. Kuenzel, 25 at the time of the crime, is now 49 and still maintains is innocence.

On Monday, his lawyer asked the federal appeals court in Atlanta to grant him a new hearing so he can present evidence to show Kuenzel did not commit the crime. But a panel of three judges on the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals did not appear inclined to grant Kuenzel the relief he seeks.

Kuenzel's lawyer, David Kochman, told the court that his client's former roommate, Harvey Venn, who said he went to the convenience store with Kuenzel and later testified Kuenzel was the killer, was the actual trigger man.

"This is not a case where we have a video of the crime," Kochman said. "If we did, it would show Venn committed it."

Assistant State Attorney General Clayton Crenshaw told the court that Kuenzel has long tried -- and failed -- to pin the killing on Venn and show he was nowhere near the crime scene. This included Kuenzel's mother allegedly trying to bribe a witness to give her son an alibi, he said.

"Kuenzel has made a pretty consistent effort to put this murder on somebody else," Crenshaw said. "Every attempt has pretty dramatically blown up in his face."

Kochman said Kuenzel's case is unlike no other, largely because his initial post-conviction appeal was found to have been filed six months too late, which has barred the introduction of newly discovered evidence.

In the meantime, Kuenzel's lawyers have uncovered grand jury testimony that throws into question the trial testimony of a key state witness and have learned that Venn, shortly before Offord's killing, may have borrowed a .16-gauge shotgun -- the kind used to kill Offord -- from a man who later told his wife he was worried the shotgun may have been the murder weapon.

Innocence claims such as those raised by Troy Anthony Davis, executed last year in the killing of a Savannah police officer, face enormous legal hurdles. Davis, after being denied a hearing for years, was finally granted one through an extraordinary ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court. Even then, a judge rejected his case.

In 1995, the U.S. Supreme Court said condemned inmates asserting their actual innocence have to show "it is more likely than not that no reasonable juror would have found [the inmate] guilty beyond a reasonable doubt." Such inmates must support their innocence claims "with new reliable evidence -- whether it be exculpatory scientific evidence, trustworthy eyewitness accounts or critical physical evidence -- that was not presented at trial."

On Monday, all three appellate judges indicated Kuenzel had not cleared such a threshold.

"You can spend all your time arguing actual innocence, but that doesn't go very far with me," Chief Judge Joel Dubina said.

Judge J.L. Edmondson told Kochman he did "not want to dampen your spirits," but he said he had closely studied the case and the lower-court judge's rejection of Kuenzel's claims and believed it would be "close to impossible for us to say your client carried the extraordinary burden you have to show."

Offord, who worked at Joe Bob's Crystal Palace in Sylacauga, Ala., was killed Nov. 9, 1987. After witnesses said they saw Venn at the convenience store that night, police questioned him. Venn initially said he was at the store with an old school friend, not Kuenzel. But Venn later said he drove to the store with Kuenzel and waited outside while Kuenzel went inside with a .16-gauge shotgun to commit a robbery.

About 10 seconds passed, Venn testified, before he looked inside and saw Offord thrown back from the shotgun blast.

Venn was the only one found with blood on him. And even though Venn testified at trial that the blood came from a squirrel, prosecutors told jurors that the blood was actually Offord's.

When asked Monday about the blood found on Venn, Crenshaw replied, "The blood cannot be explained."

Venn pleaded guilty to his role in the killing and was the state's key witness against Kuenzel. He was paroled after serving about 10 years in prison.

The only other witness to place Kuenzel at the scene was April Harris, who testified at trial that she and a friend drove by the store and saw Venn and Kuenzel there. But Harris' grand jury testimony, turned over to Kuenzel's attorneys more than a decade after the trial, showed she was unsure of what she really saw.

"I couldn't get any description," Harris told the grand jury. "I couldn't really see a face."

"April Harris is no longer a credible witness," Kochman told the court Monday.