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ST. LOUIS — The Missouri Supreme Court determined 30 years ago that Michael White’s murder case was wrongly decided.

So why is he still in prison?

That’s the question attorney Kent Gipson has been asking for several years, in court filing after court filing, arguing that his client should be free. Last week, he filed the latest petition directly to the Missouri Supreme Court, asking for a new trial.

“His conviction and incarceration for more than forty years for a crime he did not commit is fundamentally unjust,� Gipson wrote.

White got in this predicament through one of the most important, but least dramatic, elements in a criminal trial: the jury instructions.

Before a jury deliberates, the judge reads a long list of instructions that have been carefully crafted by the attorneys on both sides, often with fierce disagreements over the wording. The instructions are supposed to explain what the law says regarding the crimes a defendant is accused of committing.

Jurors must ultimately decide if the facts in the case are enough to convict a person based on the specifics in the law.

In White’s case, he was convicted of first-degree murder based on two jury instructions that the Missouri Supreme Court now says were completely wrong.

“Everything about this case was wrong from the beginning,� White told me a year ago, when I first wrote about his case.

In 1980, White was convicted in the killing of Susie Hawkins in St. Louis. White wasn’t present when Hawkins was shot by Hardy Bivens. But it was his gun. He was outside the house, in Bivens’ car, thinking he was getting a ride to see his brother-in-law.

According to testimony at the trial, White had no idea Bivens was going to shoot anybody. Bivens was 17 at the time. White was 18. The jury in White’s case was instructed that an accomplice to a killing could be found guilty of first-degree murder. According to Missouri law, a person only commits first-degree murder if they have the intent to kill, and if they have deliberated on that intent for some period of time.

But in White’s case, jurors were told that they didn’t have to find that White had intent to kill. Instead, they could impute Bivens’ motives onto his accomplice. That means White, who didn’t shoot anybody, was convicted on less evidence that Bivens, who fired the gun that killed Hawkins.

White was sentenced to life in prison with no possibility of parole for at least 50 years. His attorney appealed the conviction, arguing the jury instructions were flawed. How could an alleged accomplice be convicted on a lower standard than the person who actually committed the crime?

The argument failed. But one Missouri Supreme Court judge wrote a dissent saying it was “unthinkable that it would require less in the way of a culpable mental state to be convicted as an aider in capital murder, where the death penalty is possible, than it does to be convicted as the principal.�

In 1993, after White had been in prison for 13 years, the Missouri Supreme Court agreed — but not in White’s case. It was the case of Wayne O’Brien, involving a fight in a bar that led to a man’s death. The court overturned O’Brien’s conviction because, like White, he wasn’t present when the death took place and there was no evidence he intended anyone to die.

In deciding O’Brien’s case, the court specifically cited White’s case and said the ruling there was no longer precedent. Two other similar cases have come to the Missouri Supreme Court since then, and the court has reached similar decisions.

Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey, like former Attorney General Eric Schmitt before him, has fought to keep White in prison, arguing that the court’s decisions in cases after White’s can’t be applied retroactively. Gipson has failed in two previous attempts to free White; one was in the Cole County courts, and the other at the Missouri Supreme Court. Both cases were dismissed with no comment, meaning the court has yet to explain whether it intends to apply its new logic to White’s case.

In Missouri, innocence — or a bad application of the law — is no guarantee a person will get out of prison.

So White is still in prison. Bivens, by the way, is not. He was paroled in 2019 after the Missouri Legislature changed the parole rules for defendants convicted before they were 18. The shooter is free. White is still in prison because he got in the wrong car at the wrong time.

It’s “unthinkable,� a judge wrote decades ago, when there was still time to reduce White’s sentence and not take away his entire life. He’s hoping he can spend what’s left of that life outside the prison that’s been his home since 1980.

“The legal system was set up to establish the truth,� White wrote me in an email last year.

For 20 years, the truth in Missouri law has been that an alleged murder accomplice cannot be convicted on less evidence than the person who committed the crime.

White hopes that this time, the Missouri Supreme Court applies that truth to him.