BALDWIN COUNTY, Ala. — The man accused of stabbing two convenience store clerks to death over 11 years ago and plunging Foley and South Baldwin into a holiday season of fear, shock and grief was back in a Baldwin County courtroom last week.

Calvin Stallworth, now 38, appeared before Circuit Court Judge James Reid on June 15-16 as his attorney sought to prove “ineffective assistance of counsel” during Stallworth’s trial in 1998. Convicted on two counts of capital murder in October 1998, Stallworth has been on death row at Holman Correctional Facility in Atmore ever since.

The jury voted 10-2 in favor of the death penalty on each of Stallworth’s convictions. Those convictions were for the Dec. 4, 1997, death of Nancy Dukes, stabbed 40 times, and the Dec. 14, 1997, death of Linda Morton, stabbed six times. Both women worked in convenience stores in Foley.

Reid is expected to rule on the hearing in several months.

In September 2001 the Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals affirmed Stallworth’s convictions but remanded the case and ordered the sentencing court to address a number of issues. In March 2002 the Court of Criminal Appeals remanded the case a second time due to uncorrected errors in the sentencing orders.

In January 2003 the Appeals court affirmed Stallworth’s two death sentences. In June 2003 the Alabama Supreme Court denied Stallworth a review of his case. In September of the same year the U.S. Supreme Court denied a writ Stallworth filed with the court.

On May 10, 2007, however, attorneys for Sonnenschein Nath & Rosenthal LLP, a national law firm with hundreds of attorneys in 13 U.S. cities, won what they said was a “last ditch effort to challenge Mr. Stallworth’s conviction.” That’s when Reid agreed to an evidentiary hearing on a number of issues, one of them involving what Sonnenschein’s Web site called a “novel form of testing blood.”

On July 30, 2008, in an e-mail to Gulf Coast Newspapers concerning the pro bono work Sonnenschein is doing on behalf of Stallworth, attorney Jerome T. Wolf of Kansas City, Mo., declined to comment due to the Rule 32 hearing that was as yet nearly a year away at that point.

In paperwork Wolf submitted to the court in connection with the Rule 32 hearing, three specific claims were made as regards ineffective assistance of counsel over 11 years ago by Stallworth’s defense team: failure to perform a EDTA test on blood found on Stallworth’s jacket (EDTA being an acid used to preserve blood samples, the presence of which would prove the blood was planted on Stallworth); failure to do DNA testing on “residue” under the victims’ fingernails and on hair fibers at the crime scenes; and failure to secure the testimony of a blood splatter expert.