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Prosecutor Tim Finnical faced a jury in Dent County, where the trial had been moved, and told them that Rodney Carr stabbed Jackson. The jury believed Finnical and convicted Carr. A judge sentenced him to life in prison. He’s there today.

But it wasn’t true. Finnical said so himself in a letter he signed in 2019.

“Mr. Carr was not the person who actually stabbed the victim,� Finnical wrote in a letter to the governor’s office seeking a pardon for Carr.

That pardon hasn’t come. And now Carr’s attorneys, Elizabeth Ramsey and her father, Robert, are seeking a new hearing to prove their client’s innocence.

In a brief filed last month in St. Francois County, where Carr is in prison, they argue that the case was a mess from the beginning, with evidence kept from the defendant, differing stories from the prosecutor, intimidation of some witnesses and the encouragement of other witnesses to lie.

“We have never had a case like this,� Elizabeth Ramsey told me in an interview.

That’s saying something. The have represented some of the state’s most famous men wrongfully convicted of murder. They include Mark Woodworth, convicted in a 1990 murder in Chillicothe, and Brad Jennings, convicted of his wife’s murder on Christmas Day in 2006.

Carr was one of three men charged in the death of Jackson after the riot at Moberly Correctional Center. After two botched murder trials, Robert Driscoll was found guilty of manslaughter by a jury in his third trial. He was sentenced to time served and released. Driscoll, the man who actually stabbed Jackson, told multiple people, in prison and outside, that Carr had nothing to do with the killing.

Another inmate at the time, Roy Roberts, was found guilty of holding Jackson while Driscoll stabbed him. Roberts was put to death by the state in 1999.

“You’re killing an innocent man, and you all can kiss my (expletive),� Roberts famously said before he died.

In each of the men’s trials, however, Finnical offered differing and contradictory arguments about Jackson’s death, according to the petition filed by the Ramseys for Carr.

“The transcripts from Mr. Carr’s Co-Defendant’s trials, not disclosed to Petitioner, show glaring and irreconcilable inconsistencies among crucial state’s witnesses, mutually-exclusive and competing case theories and fact patterns,� the petition reads. “The State ... presented vastly different fact patterns through their witnesses at each trial. The State presented testimony that, taken together, could not possibly be true. The State’s witnesses changed their testimony about important facts from one trial to the next ... and the flip-flopping testimony of guards and inmates depending on which defendant was on trial and what they needed to convict.�

Among the key pieces of evidence is a pair of jean shorts Carr was wearing on the day of the riot. The state had those shorts and tested them, finding no blood nor DNA from Jackson. But that fact was never revealed — not even the existence of the shorts — to Carr’s defense attorney. Carr didn’t find out until investigators working for the Ramseys examined transcripts of the trials.

When the riot broke out in Moberly, Carr was a month from being released after serving time for a stealing charge. He had no motivation to be involved in Jackson’s death. Carr, 62, grew up in St. Louis, mostly living on the north side of the city. His parents, Ann and John Carr, now live in Troy, Missouri. Carr married his high school sweetheart, Peggy, in 2019.

He has been, according to testimony from current and past corrections employees, a model prisoner, volunteering in the prison hospice to help fellow inmates who are dying.

Ramsey hopes that, unlike Carr’s previous attempt to obtain a pardon, this latest court action gets the attention it deserves.

“There is really nothing to hang the conviction on anymore that is the least bit credible,� she says. “Rodney is innocent. We have definitive proof now.�

Editor's note: An earlier version of this column inaccurately described Driskoll's manslaughter conviction.