Missouri's Supreme Court should erase Andrew Lemasters' 31-year prison sentence and his June 2013 conviction for statutory sodomy - and order a new trial with a different prosecutor, the state public defender's office argued Wednesday.
Lemasters, now 49, currently is in the Jefferson City Correctional Center, following his conviction by a Newton County jury after a two-day trial.
But his attorney had argued the Newton County prosecutor's office should have been replaced in the case, after Lemasters' first attorney - Public Defender Melia Cheney - changed jobs and went to work for the prosecutor's office.
"The state standard," Assistant Public Defender William J. Swift told the high court, "is whether there's an appearance of impropriety in situations where an attorney changes sides from the defense side, and goes to a prosecutor's office."
The ultimate problem would be the knowledge Cheney had about Lemasters' case - and how her new colleagues in the prosecutor's office could benefit unfairly from information and use it against Lemasters.
She had told the trial court that she didn't discuss the Lemasters case, or any others she had worked on, after she changed jobs.
Cheney reported she avoided working on any cases involving the public defender's office and had worked, instead, only with cases where the defendants were represented by private attorneys or where the defendants represented themselves.
The trial court found that the Newton County prosecutor's office properly "screened" her from the Lemasters case, and didn't learn anything from Cheney about that case.
The judge denied the public defender's motion for a change in prosecutors.
The state's Springfield-based Southern District appeals court agreed with the trial judge's decision, in a 10-page ruling on June 20.
But, Swift argued Wednesday, Cheney had "engaged in much work and preparation" for Lemasters' case before changing jobs.
"The amount of time is really not what's critical here - it's the kind of preparation that she did," he explained. "She did an initial letter to the client, advising him of the kinds of matters that ought to be taken into account, to start up the case.
"She entered her appearance (as Lemasters' attorney). She assigned a paralegal to do certain investigations."
Assistant Attorney General Adam S. Rowley countered that, rather than a blanket rule affecting all cases, trial judges should be given the right to examine challenges on a case-by-case basis, "as the judge did in this case - and found the screening procedures to be effective."
Rowley said Swift wants the high court to say the "appearance of impropriety" standard shouldn't be connected to the court's existing ethics rules.
But Rowley thinks the court should tie the issue to violations of those rules.
"If not, we're not giving attorneys notice of what is improper and what is not improper," he said. "That is not a road that we should go down."
Rather, Rowley told the court, prosecutors should be allowed to screen each potential conflict of interest on a case-by-case basis, then determine whether its office should be removed from an individual case.
As usual, the seven-judge court didn't say when it might rule on the case.