One of the last three men to be on Colorado’s death row, now serving a life sentence in prison, is asking the Court of Appeals to grant him a new trial because of the pervasive unfairness Sir Mario Owens believes led to his 2007 murder conviction.

Owens now argues he received ineffective assistance of counsel during trial, and that one juror not only lied to the court, but had a highly unorthodox series of personal connections to the victim and multiple witnesses.

“At stake here are constitutional protections of extraordinary importance,” attorney Jonathan D. Reppucci told the three-judge panel hearing Owens’ appeal on Tuesday. “Justice must achieve not only the reality of fairness but the appearance of fairness.”

An Arapahoe County jury originally convicted Owens for the slaying of Gregory Vann, 20, on July 4, 2004. A separate jury in 2008 convicted him again for the murders one year later of Javad Marshall-Fields and Vivian Wolfe, both 22. Marshall-Fields was scheduled to testify against another suspect in Vann’s murder. Owens received a death sentence for the murders of Marshall-Fields and Wolfe, which Gov. Jared Polis commuted to a life sentence after the state legislature abolished capital punishment last year.

In a 222-page filing to the appeals court, Owens meticulously outlined how evidence reportedly suggested from the beginning that someone else murdered Vann during a chaotic scene at a Lowry Park gathering. From an initial police bulletin with three suspect descriptions that did not match Owens to prosecutors’ alleged preferential treatment of one of the only witnesses who identified Owens, the defense at trial did not have access to crucial evidence, the appeal argued.

Owens also faulted his public defenders at trial for a strategy that was not only subpar, but so deficient as to violate his constitutional right to effective representation. Specifically, his lawyers tried to argue the case was one of mistaken identity – but also one of Owens defending himself, which could not both be true.

“It was a complete seat-of-the-pants … I wasn’t prepared to do it. We did not have a cohesive trial strategy,” the appeal filing quotes one of his defenders as saying.

In a highly unusual situation, Owens then pointed to the potential bias of a woman on his jury who, at the time, was named Stephanie Griggs and referred to in court documents as Juror 75. She never disclosed during the trial that testifying witnesses were her son’s friends, that the victim – Vann – had been a guest in her home, and that she provided false information on her juror questionnaire.

The appellate judges struggled with whether Juror 75, despite having those parties in her home when they were kids, actually recognized them as such during the trial.

“We have testimony from her son that [Vann] was a frequent guest at the house and she was liked by a lot of his friends,” said Judge Craig R. Welling. “But we don’t have a finding one way or the other as to whether or not she knew Mr. Vann.”

Senior Assistant Attorney General Jillian J. Price said Juror 75 did not know the full names of the witnesses, and did not report specifically recognizing them.

“It’s just like if I go to a party and meet somebody who I know is Bill and that’s all I ever know him as,” she said. “Then I see ‘Bill Smith’ on a cold witness list. There’s no way I could match those two people.”

But Owens countered that Juror 75’s connections were more deep-seated. Juror 75 admitted that some testifying witnesses, friends of her son, mouthed “Hi Mom” to her during the trial, and that when she went to her son’s apartment in the middle of proceedings, she saw and hugged someone who had just testified. Afterward, her son told her that his “homeboys were testifying” and she needed to get herself excused from the trial.

Price attempted to downplay the contact, telling the panel the witnesses were not Juror 75’s friends, and that the court should avoid a “slippery slope” of examining the associates of jurors’ children, spouses and even coworkers for conflicts.

“She saw a testifying witness out of court the night he testified and had an interaction with him,” Welling countered. “This is not, ‘I have a coworker who once went to dinner with somebody.’ These are pretty first- and second-degree connections.”

At one point, Juror 75 did communicate with the trial judge, Michael Spear, through a bailiff that she recognized someone in the courtroom as well as other “people.” The bailiff reportedly told her the judge said it was “not a problem.” The appellate panel expressed concern that Juror 75’s precise situation may have gotten lost in translation.

“I don’t think anyone would dispute that had this information or almost any of it been known to the trial judge,” said Judge Michael H. Berger, “this juror would not have been deliberating on this case.”

The Sixth Amendment guarantees criminal defendants the right to trial by an impartial jury, meaning that jurors must decide a case based only on the evidence presented at trial.

Reppucci asked the appellate court to consider whether extraneous information, such as Juror 75’s personal contact with the witness and the directive from her son, would have influenced a reasonable juror, regardless of whether the contact actually biased her. Spear had directly instructed the jury that if anyone recognized a witness “from some setting outside of the courtroom,” they were to bring it to the court’s attention.

Previously, Christopher J. Munch, a retired district court judge, was specially appointed to review Owens’s post-conviction claims. Owens argued to the Court of Appeals that Munch’s handling of the matter was deeply flawed. In addition to severely curtailing in-person testimony for Owens’s witnesses, the defense argued Munch offered no assessment about the outside influences on Juror 75.

On appeal, Owens pointed to several false answers on Juror 75’s court questionnaire, where she falsely said she was not a victim or party to any court proceeding, and claimed she did not recognize the names of Vann or Marshall-Fields. The defense alleged 14 court proceedings that Juror 75 was a part of, and noted the murders of Marshall-Fields and Wolfe happened around the corner from where Juror 75 lived.

The attorney general’s office excused those errors as “carelessness,” and said Juror 75 did not make the connections until after the trial.

“Because her false answers and non-disclosures deprived Owens and the court of critical information that provided multiple bases to remove her, Owens is entitled to a new trial,” the defense insisted.

At several points during oral arguments, Reppucci appeared troubled by the panel’s adverse line of questioning, before venting at the end that “this is concerning to me that this court is gonna go down that path, but the court will do what the court will do.”

“We haven’t said what path we’re going down, so don’t be concerned yet,” Berger cautioned him. “We’re trying to figure out what to do.”

Reppucci apologized and noted “this is a difficult case.”

Likewise, the oral arguments were difficult to watch for Rhonda Fields, the mother of Marshall-Fields and now a Democratic state senator for Aurora.

“My son was murdered in 2005 and I’m confronted just this week with the possibility of a new trial,” she said after attending the proceedings in person. “It’s really hard to comprehend what justice looks like.”

Owens suggested to the appellate court that Robert Ray, who also received a death sentence for the murders of Marshall-Fields and Wolfe, was the one who killed Vann. The appellate panel’s ruling in the Vann murder could affect proceedings in his death penalty case.

The case is People v. Owens.