BRIGHAM CITY — The appeal of the conviction in the 1984 murder of a gas station attendant now includes the Utah Attorney General’s Office backing the defense work in the 2008 trial of the accused.

Glenn Howard Griffin is serving a life-without-parole prison term in the bludgeoning and stabbing death of Bradley Newell Perry, a case solved 21 years later with DNA evidence. Griffin was found guilty by a 1st District Court jury which opted against the death penalty in a trial spread over two months in the fall of 2008.

Key evidence is a dollar bill splattered with Griffin’s blood that customers received as Griffin posed as an employee to pump gas at the then-Texaco station at Brigham’s south end, according to testimony, while Perry lay bleeding inside. DNA testing identified the blood on the bill handed out as change as Griffin’s.

In January the Utah Supreme Court sent the case back to 1st District Court for fact-finding on the grounds raised in Griffin’s appeal, which hinges on claims of ineffective counsel. The high court asked for exploration of three issues raised by Griffin’s appeal attorney Jennifer Gowans: a conflict of interest alleged with one of the defense attorneys, the decision by the defense not to call a witness regarding another suspect, and the defense opting against telling the jury of that same suspect’s burglary of Perry’s home a few weeks after the killing.

After an April 9 half-day hearing before Judge Ben Hadfield, called out of retirement to sit for the hearing, Hadfield ordered attorneys on both sides to file briefs in the case.

The Attorney General’s Office, which defends all criminal appeals, in its pleadings filed last week argued the decisions regarding the other suspect in the case, a 15-year-old neighbor of the Perry’s, “would have done nothing to explain the state’s most damning evidence: two forms of Griffin’s DNA at the crime scene and his statements in the jail.”

An inmate testified at trial to hearing Griffin say Perry must have bit him to account for his blood on the dollar bill. Gowans’ response is due this week.

The other suspect, the teen named Craig Martinez, was clearly identified at trial by defense attorneys Randy Richards, the late John Caine, and Dee Smith as a suspect, Assistant Attorney General John J. Nielsen argues.

“Counsel did present substantial evidence of third-party guilt (of Martinez) at trial,” he wrote. That included a friend saying Martinez admitted to the killing and a woman who claimed Martinez assaulted her when she accused him.

But Martinez’s DNA did not match that of the bloody dollar bill and he didn’t come close to resembling the description of the killer given by the customers who received the bloody bill, Nielsen argues.

The defense opted not to put a man on the stand who claimed to see blood on Martinez’ shirt at a party the night of the killing because the witness was drunk and high, Nielsen writes, had a prior conviction for lying to police and admitted coming forward while in jail to lessen his sentence.

Police concluded Martinez’s subsequent break-in at the Perry home shortly after Perry’s funeral was unrelated to the murder, and involved the ransacking of the whole house, not just the 22-year-old murder victim’s room, according to the attorney general’s 30-page brief. Cash, cassette tapes, and piggy banks were stolen.

The conflict-of-interest claim involves a defense attorney who cross-examined one witness at Griffin’s trial. The lawyer had represented another potential witness in the case two years earlier. Nielsen wrote there was no “reasonable probability” the possible conflict would have had any impact on the outcome of the trial.

To prove ineffective counsel, case law requires, according to Nielsen’s brief, a demonstration of “no conceivable tactical basis” for a defense strategy. “Even the best criminal defense attorneys would not defend a particular client in the same way.”