Leisure: “I’m an innocent man.”

Lawyer Barry Short had the unenviable job of telling David Leisure he was about to die.

Short, now senior partner at Lewis, Rice & Fingersh, recalls sitting in his St. Louis office with a few associates after midnight 14 years ago waiting for a phone call from the U.S. Supreme Court. When it came, it didn’t bring the news they were hoping for. The court had turned down the last-minute reprieve the attorneys had sought for Leisure, who was convicted of a 1980 car bombing.

Short called the prison to talk to Leisure, whose attorneys had argued his low IQ rendered him mentally incompetent to be executed and that he was the least culpable of the three men involved in the mob-related bombing that killed James A. Michaels Sr.

“I had to tell him in the wee hours of the morning that the Supreme Court had turned down [the appeal] and literally in minutes they were going to come to get him and execute him,” Short said. “I’ll remember that till the day I die.”

Leisure was unfailingly polite to Short, who was appointed by the U.S. District Court in St. Louis to handle the final appeal of his death sentence. And it was no different in their last conversation: Leisure thanked the attorneys for all the work they had done and wished them the best, Short said.

But Leisure’s last statement as reported by the Missouri Department of Corrections didn’t reflect that politeness and gratitude, instead focusing in part on his trial lawyers’ work.

“I’m an innocent man,” Leisure said. “The lawyer who represented me was on drugs. Tell my children and family and relatives, I love ’em.”

The “lawyer” Leisure was referring to was a law student, Gerald Bassett, who had helped attorney Alan Zvibleman defend Leisure. Bassett said in an affidavit that he had been using illegal drugs at the time he was helping in the defense, according to news accounts.

Bassett could not be reached for comment. An attorney whose biography matched his was admitted to practice in Georgia in 2000 and had a law firm in Savannah, according to the firm’s website. But Bassett failed to pay bar dues and is ineligible to practice, according to the State Bar of Georgia website.

“I absolutely believe he should not have been executed,” Zvibleman said of Leisure.

Zvibleman, who now practices family law at St. Louis firm Capes, Sokol, Goodman & Sarachan, declined to comment further.