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A death penalty trial began this week at the federal courthouse in Springfield.
But even if the defendant is found guilty, he will probably die before he's executed, according to his lawyer.
Ulysses Jones Jr., 61, is accused of killing 38-year-old Timothy Baker with a makeshift knife in January 2006 at the U.S. Medical Center for Federal Prisoners in Springfield, where both men were prisoners.
Jones is standing trial this week, more than a decade after the homicide, but the court is taking half-days on Tuesdays and Thursdays to accommodate his twice-weekly dialysis treatments.
Jones' attorney Thomas Carver said Jones has bad kidneys and is slowly dying.
If Jones is convicted and sentenced to death, Carver said, he will likely die at some point during the decade-long appeals process that accompanies most capital cases.
"He suffers from end-stage renal disease," Carver said. "That is a terminal disease. He will die from it."
Carver said Jones has been on dialysis for the last 30 years, a remarkable feat since the average life expectancy for people in his situation is between 5 and 10 years, according to the National Kidney Foundation.
Carver said his client's illness helps explain why authorities took four years to charge Jones with Baker's killing and another seven years to bring the case to trial.
"I am confident that he was not indicted until 2010 because the government was hoping he would die," Carver said.
A spokesman for the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Western District of Missouri declined to discuss the specifics of the Jones case, saying it would be inappropriate to do so while the case was going before a jury.
Jones is already serving a life sentence for two robberies and murders in 1979 and 1980 in Washington, D.C., according to his lawyer.
When Jones was sentenced for his second murder conviction, the prosecutor reportedly called Jones "a man marked by savagery, viciousness and brutality."
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Source: Springfield News Leader, Harrison Keegan, Sept. 30, 2017
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"One is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed,
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted." -- Oscar Wilde
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted." -- Oscar Wilde
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