The state Supreme Court hears arguments in the inmate's bid for a new trial in a 1982 murder.

On Nov. 16, 1990, Roy Clifton Swafford came within two hours of execution in Florida's electric chair for the 1982 murder of a Volusia County gas station clerk.

On Thursday, his lawyer went before the Florida Supreme Court to argue that Swafford, 52, deserves a new trial.

Not only did prosecutors withhold information about another suspect, said attorney Martin McClain, but an affidavit by a witness the jury never heard supports Swafford's claim that the state has the wrong man on death row.

"This defendant is innocent," McClain said.

But Assistant Attorney General Judy Taylor Rush told the seven justices that Swafford "essentially confessed" and that the condemned man's trial attorneys could have found out about the other suspect but decided not to pursue him.

What's more, Rush said, ballistics tests showed that a stolen gun identified as the murder weapon belonged to Swafford. "That was conclusively established," she said.

Swafford, a former Tennessee Eagle Scout, was sentenced to death in November 1985 for abducting Brenda Rucker, a 27-year-old clerk at a Fina station in Ormond Beach, in 1982. Prosecutors said he raped her and shot her nine times.

During Thursday's arguments, Justices Barbara Pariente and Peggy Quince called the case against Swafford highly circumstantial. They wanted to know about the activities and whereabouts of James Michael Walsh on the day of the murder. Walsh was the original murder suspect.

The night of the crime, Swafford and some pals, who were in Florida to attend the Daytona 500 car race, got involved in a bar dispute. The police were called, and they seized a gun in a trash can in one of the restrooms of the bar.

But Swafford was not a murder suspect then. Homicide detectives focused on Walsh, who an anonymous caller said matched a composite sketch of Rucker's killer.

Walsh was known to carry a .38-caliber handgun, the type of weapon used in the Rucker homicide. What's more, the medical examiner found cigarette burns on Rucker's body similar to those allegedly inflicted by Walsh on an Illinois man named Michael Lestz during homosexual attacks. And police reports said that when Walsh was later arrested, he had in his possession a composite drawing of the Rucker murder suspect.

The case went unsolved, however, and 16 months later police received a tip that Swafford was involved. Ballistics experts identified the gun that prosecutors said Swafford tossed in the trash can of the bar restroom as the murder weapon. At his 1985 trial, prosecutors also presented testimony from two witnesses who said Swafford had basically confessed.

Four years and 10 months after a judge sent Swafford to death row, then-Gov. Bob Martinez signed a death warrant. It was only then that defense attorneys got copies of police reports about the first suspect, Walsh.

The Florida Supreme Court granted a stay until Nov. 16, 1990, and just as prison officials prepared to shave Swafford's head and leg for the electric chair, the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta canceled the death date.

Florida's high court had upheld Swafford's sentence in 1988 and went on to reject appeals in 1990, 1991 and 1994.

That was the year Swafford's investigators found Lestz, the Illinois man attacked by Walsh. Lestz signed an affidavit stating that on the day of the Daytona 500 Walsh was very nervous and in a "big rush" to get rid of two .38s. A couple of days later, Walsh got upset when he saw pamphlets about Rucker's homicide and began snatching them off cars, Lestz said in the affidavit.

The Florida Supreme Court ordered a trial court to review the new evidence, but in 1997 Circuit Judge R. Michael Hutcheson said the new affidavit and information about the other suspect would probably not have led to an acquittal. That decision prompted Thursday's arguments.