Mother and daughter spent their final evening collectively enjoying playing cards. The subsequent afternoon, the daughter, Carlotta Nickens, stopped by her mom’s condo and located her face down within the hallway.

The condo appeared “like a tornado hit it,” Ms. Nickens later stated, in response to courtroom data. “It was all messed up. Everything was just scattered everywhere.”

Her mom, Henrietta Nickens, 70, was useless. She had been hit within the face, probably with a fist, and died of a cardiac dysrhythmia, partly brought on by the blows and partly by her underlying lung and coronary heart illness, courtroom data present. Evidence instructed she could have been sexually assaulted.

On Tuesday, the three males who have been tried and convicted of murdering Ms. Nickens in Chester, Pa., about 14 miles southwest of Philadelphia, requested a choose to overturn their convictions. They argued that new DNA proof means that an unidentified man whose semen was discovered on the scene and whose DNA was later discovered on different objects there was liable for her brutal loss of life in October 1997.

“We now have conclusive proof that a single perpetrator, who was likely drug-fueled, sexually assaulted and murdered Henrietta Nickens,” Nilam A. Sanghvi and John M. Lyons, legal professionals for one of many males, Derrick Chappell, who was 15 when Ms. Nickens was murdered, wrote in courtroom filings.

Mr. Chappell, now 41; Morton Johnson, 43; and Samuel Grasty, 46, requested Judge Mary Alice Brennan of the Delaware County Court of Common Pleas to order new trials.

Prosecutors opposed the requests, arguing that the DNA proof wouldn’t have modified the result of the trials through which the lads have been convicted and that it didn’t show that an unidentified man raped and murdered Ms. Nickens.

Judge Brennan is just not anticipated to rule instantly on the dispute, as she considers arguments from each side. But the lads imagine the proof proves that they’ve spent half their lives in jail for a homicide they didn’t commit.

Paul Casteleiro, a lawyer for Mr. Grasty, who was 20 when Ms. Nickens was murdered, stated in an interview on Monday that Mr. Grasty “just wants the truth out there, and he’s very hopeful that the judge is going to see the evidence and agree.”

Carlotta Nickens and different family members of Ms. Nickens couldn’t be reached for remark.

Investigators initially believed that Ms. Nickens had been sexually assaulted as a result of her underwear had been eliminated, her bedsheets have been bloodstained and semen was discovered inside her physique, Mr. Chappell’s legal professionals wrote.

DNA testing accomplished earlier than the lads have been convicted discovered that the semen had come from an unknown man and never from any of them, legal professionals for Mr. Chappell wrote. With no rationalization for the male DNA, prosecutors “quietly dropped rape and sexual assault charges” within the case and “chalked this unknown DNA up to a ‘mystery,’” Mr. Chappell’s legal professionals wrote.

Mr. Grasty, Mr. Johnson and Mr. Chappell have been convicted of second-degree homicide, their legal professionals stated, primarily based on the testimony of a 15-year-old from the neighborhood named Richard McElwee, whom the lads’s legal professionals described in courtroom papers as cognitively impaired.

He testified that he had acted as a lookout on the evening of Oct. 9, 1997, when the then 18-year-old Mr. Johnson, Mr. Chappell and Mr. Grasty, who was courting Ms. Nickens’s granddaughter on the time, broke into Ms. Nickens’s condo and stole $30.

Mr. Chappell, Mr. Johnson and Mr. Grasty have been sentenced to life in jail. Because he was a juvenile, Mr. Chappell was later resentenced to twenty-eight years to life, making him eligible for parole in 2028. Under a cope with the prosecutors, Mr. McElwee pleaded responsible to third-degree homicide and different costs and was sentenced to 6 to 12 years in jail.

Mr. Chappell, Mr. Johnson and Mr. Grasty unsuccessfully appealed their convictions earlier than prosecutors agreed in 2021 to further DNA testing, which their legal professionals argue ought to now exonerate them.

The outcomes confirmed that the lads weren’t the supply of DNA on Ms. Nickens’s bedding, on a inexperienced jacket that was left on a tv in her house or on a chewed straw that was discovered within the pocket of the jacket together with a baggie with cocaine residue, in response to the lads’s legal professionals.

The testing established as an alternative that the DNA on every of these things belonged to the identical unidentified man whose semen had beforehand been discovered inside Ms. Nickens’s physique and on a stain on the jacket, the legal professionals stated.

Investigators have by no means been in a position to establish the supply of the DNA, regardless of looking regulation enforcement databases.

Prosecutors stated in courtroom papers that, apart from the extra DNA from the unknown man that was discovered on the straw and the bedding, the brand new testing “did not provide any significant evidence in regard to this case.”

“First, it should surprise no one that there was DNA on the bedsheet that matched the DNA inside Ms. Nickens,” wrote Sara G. Vanore, an assistant district lawyer in Delaware County, Pa.

And, she added, “The fact that this person, still unidentified, also wore a jacket with a chewed straw in the pocket that he left in her apartment does not establish that he murdered her and does not seem likely to have changed the verdict, given what was already known about the semen in Ms. Nickens.”

Ms. Vanore urged the courtroom to uphold the convictions.

“Absent compelling evidence of innocence, the jury’s verdict should not be disturbed,” she wrote. “The post-conviction DNA evidence is neither compelling nor is it evidence of innocence.”