The Trial

The jury was assembled in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in the middle of one of the worst ice storms Tulsa had experienced in memory. The city was frozen. Courts were shutting down. Outside, the world had become a place where movement was difficult, dangerous. Many homes were without power. Many families were relocating to hotels and motels for warmth.

Clarance asked Larry Edwards whether they were going to proceed. Whether it was possible to request a continuance: to wait for conditions under which the jury could be assembled from a wider pool, under which witnesses who hadn’t been subpoenaed might be reached, under which the timeline that hadn’t been completed might be finished. Edwards said: “Clarance, I’m just ready to get it over with.” That was the last thing he heard from his attorney before the trial began.

The jury was nearly all white. The one Black juror worked overnight shifts for the City and was visibly exhausted throughout the proceedings, falling asleep, unable to maintain the sustained attention a capital murder trial demands. Mayor Kathy Taylor reportedly called to have him excused. He was not excused. He continued to sit on that jury. Eventually, the single Black juror on this case was excused, believed to have been replaced by a woman of Hispanic descent.

Larry Edwards had been a prosecutor for fifteen years before coming to the defense side. He had experience. He had skill. When he at last visited Penny Avans, the witness Clarance had been urging him to see from the beginning, he came back transformed. He sat down across from Clarance on a weekday instead of his usual Sunday visit, took out his notepad, crossed his legs, said: “You were telling me the fucking truth.” After that, he worked with a different energy. He began building timelines. He began engaging with the case as though it were real, as though the life on the table were worth the full expenditure of his abilities.

But he did not finish. He ran out of something, commitment, energy, patience, or perhaps all three, before the work was done. By the time the trial arrived, key witnesses had not been subpoenaed. The alibi timeline was incomplete. The tools the jury needed to understand the impossibility of the prosecution’s account had not been assembled. And Edwards had said, with the weariness of someone who has already moved on, that he was ready to get it over with.

What Clarance did not know at the time, what emerged only later, was the network of personal, professional relationships that surrounded the trial. Edwards had once been a prosecutor and maintained close friendships with former colleagues who have moved into the judiciary. One of those friendships was with William “Bill” Musseman, who now sits on the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals (OCCA), the very court that would eventually review Clarance’s conviction. While representing Clarance in a capital case, Edwards, knowing Clarance’s love for sports, told Clarance that he and Musseman often attended Dallas Cowboys football games together.

At the time, Musseman was an assistant district attorney. He eventually became a Tulsa District Judge, later a judge on the OCCA. After finding out about Edwards’ personal association with Musseman, it may have been wiser for Clarance to obtain different counsel. But La Kendra had already paid Edwards between fifteen and twenty thousand dollars in upfront legal fees. The state covered additional costs. At one point, there was even a conversation about his grandmother signing over the deed to her home to pay more. Edwards was collecting fees from every direction. Still, at the moment that counted most, he said he was ready to be done.

On the stand, both Michelle and Ronald were impeached. They were caught lying: caught contradicting themselves, contradicting each other, contradicting the physical evidence.

The judge gave the jury a special instruction: they could believe all, some, or none of what these witnesses said. In any fair reading of what that instruction means, it means the testimony was so compromised as to be unreliable. The judge left the testimony standing anyway. He put the question to the jury.

Michelle’s testimony fell apart in real time under cross-examination. The transcript shows her offering details that did not correspond to the crime scene: wounds that didn’t exist, multiple shots the evidence didn’t support. She was not lying with skill. What the transcript shows is desperation: a witness improvising because she couldn’t admit that she didn’t know what had happened that night, because she had not been there to witness it the way the prosecution needed her to have been. She kept going because she couldn’t stop. Because stopping would have been worse. From the witness stand, she claimed that Clarance had told her he shot her brother with a shotgun: a weapon that does not appear in the crime scene evidence, a conversation Clarance says never happened, a claim the physical evidence did not support at all. The judge saw it. The jury instruction said so. And somehow the verdict went the other way anyway.

There was also video of prosecutors coaching Ronald before his testimony. In the footage, an investigator with the DA’s office can be heard responding to Ronald’s inconsistent account with: “Hold up, that don’t even make sense.” He knew the story didn’t hold together. He used it anyway.

Kenneth, whose childhood connection to Clarance was part of what Van Ellis exploited when he pressured him for statements, received a life sentence. He never testified at trial, but he made statements that were false: statements he has since admitted were coerced, that he was manipulated into making through the pressure applied by a man who had known his father. He has said, since, that those statements were not true. That acknowledgment, too, has not been enough to bring Clarance a hearing.

The footage exists. It can be watched.