FAYE COPELAND STILL AWAITING DEATH PENALTY

While Faye Copeland sits on death row at Missouri's Chillicothe Correctional Center, her attorney is trying desperately to overturn the 75-year-old grandmother's convictions for helping her husband kill transients in a livestock swindle.

Gaining a new trial is highly improbable since the U.S. Supreme Court last week refused to even review her 1990 convictions in Livingston County that brought sentences of death in four killings and life without parole in a fifth. Now her attorney, Sean O'Brien of Kansas City, says he will file an appeal in federal court seeking either a new trial or to have her convictions set aside.

In almost all instances the appeals process for death-row inmates is a seemingly never-ending journey into futility, and Copeland's case is no different. At her age she could be dead before all of the appeals are exhausted.

One can't help but wonder what her attorney hopes to accomplish outside of mobilizing public sentiment for Copeland because she is the oldest woman in the nation on death row. And so far he has been unable to do that.