A man convicted of capital murder and sentenced to death in the 1990 slaying of a Homewood woman who was found bound, beaten, raped, and stabbed with her throat slit was granted a new trial but has now pleaded guilty.

Steven Alan Petric, 62, was convicted in 2009 in the brutal death of 23-year-old Toni Lim.

The Alabama Court of Appeals four years ago affirmed a lower court ruling granting a new trial for the Death Row prisoner based upon claims of ineffective representation at trial.

Petric last year was offered a sentence of life with the possibility of parole in exchange for a guilty plea but rejected that offer and said he wanted to take his chances with a jury – again.

Today, Petric appeared before Jefferson County Circuit Court Judge Michael Streety and entered his plead of guilty to intentional murder.

Streety sentenced Petric to 28 years in prison. Lim’s family was at the hearing and supported the plea.

Petric received credit for time served from his official arrest date in 2007. He will likely be eligible for parole within a year, but prosecutors and family will work each time to oppose release.

Without parole, Petric could be free in 2035.

“The passage of time is never friendly to the state in a criminal prosecution. When our office successfully prosecuted Steven Petric in 2009, the case was nearly 20 years old,’’ Jefferson County Deputy District Attorneys Neal Zarzour and Misty Reynolds said in a statement to AL.com.

“The Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals upheld both the guilty verdict and death sentence,’’ prosecutors said. “Nevertheless, almost a decade after the original conviction, a former Circuit Court Judge who publicly opposed the death penalty granted the defendant a new trial.”

“This obviously put the state in an extremely difficult position, trying to prosecute a homicide that is now almost 35 years old,’’ the statement continued.”

Multiple key witnesses from the case are now dead, and there are others whose whereabouts are unknown.

“In discussing these challenges with Toni’s family, everyone agreed that the goal of holding Steven Petric accountable for Toni’s murder overrode the risk of trial,’’ prosecutors said. “This plea accomplishes that goal.”

For the first time ever, Zarzour and Reynolds said, Petric had to acknowledge that he intentionally caused Lim’s death by stabbing her with a knife. He maintained his innocence until today, saying he had only consensual sex with Lim.

“He can no longer deny his brutal actions, and he will have time to reflect on that as he sits in the penitentiary as a convicted murderer with no further right to an appeal,’’ they said.

“Make no mistake, Petric deserved every bit of the original sentence he received in 2009,’’ according to prosecutors.

“Toni’s family has been dealing with this trauma since March of 1990. Finally, they can have some closure knowing that her killer has admitted his guilt and will remain in prison for the foreseeable future.”

Petric was represented by lawyers Scott Brower, Wendell Sheffield, and Anthony Bowling.

Lim, a student and employee of Sammy’s strip club on Valley Avenue, was discovered slain on March 9, 1990, inside her Raleigh Villas apartment that she shared with a roommate.

The roommate found Lim’s body when she returned from work about 8 p.m.

The roommate, Martha Milinda Higginbotham, previously testified there was no forced entry at the apartment and that Lim had told her that a man named “Steven” was going to help her fix the brakes on her car.

Higginbotham also said that a man named “Steven” sometimes gave Lim a ride home from school.

When Lim was found lying on her bed in her apartment, her body was covered with a blanket and her head was covered with a pillow.

An autopsy showed she had suffered a stab wound to the back of her neck and a large cut across her throat. She was wearing only a shirt and a bra.

A blood-soaked t-shirt was tied loosely around her neck.

Her hands were tied behind her back with pantyhose. Court records show an exercise rope was tied tightly around her right wrist and the rope extended down to her ankles, which were bound by the rope.

The rope was tied in such a way that it would tighten if Lim’s legs were straightened.

Lim’s case went unsolved for more than a decade, until 2006 when a routine submission of his DNA to a national database matched DNA found at the scene of Lim’s death.

At the time Homewood police charged Petric with Lim’s murder, he was serving a 26-year prison sentence for armed robbery in Illinois.

During his Alabama trial, prosecutors portrayed a pattern by Petric of attacking women at knifepoint before stealing their wedding rings.

Several women came forward to say he attacked them in the early 1990s.

Jurors in the Birmingham trial heard about two other attacks on women in 1994 in Illinois that prosecutors attributed to Petric, one fatal and one non-fatal.

The judge barred testimony in the trial about three other attacks against women, two in the Birmingham area and one in Illinois. Petric has a criminal history dating back to 1979.

The Alabama jury convicted Petric in August 2009.

Jefferson County Circuit Judge Bill Cole sentenced Petric to die by lethal injection. Petric had this to say at the time:

“I know it is customary for the defendant to ask the family for mercy, but how can I? I’m not guilty.’’

In February 2018, then Jefferson County Circuit Judge Tracie Todd overturned Petric’s conviction.

Todd, twice suspended from the bench since 2021 and convicted of violating judicial ethics, resigned last year.

According to deathpenaltyinfo.org, prosecutors said DNA evidence from semen and cigarette butts linked Petric to the crime, and they presented extensive evidence arguing that Petric had raped and murdered the woman he had been dating in Illinois.

Todd ruled that Charles Salvagio, Petric’s first attorney, had unreasonably failed to investigate the Illinois case and failed to rebut the prosecution’s claims by showing that the jury there had acquitted Petric after video footage showed he had been elsewhere when those crimes were committed.

The court further found that Salvagio, who died in 2020, had unreasonably promised the jury during his opening statement that the defense would show that another man who knew the victim had committed a similar murder, without having reviewed the record of the other case.

At the close of the prosecution’s case against Petric, the defense was provided with a DNA report that cleared the alternate suspect of the other murder, leaving counsel without a defense.

State prosecutors appealed Todd’s ruling, but the Alabama Criminal Court of Appeals on Aug. 14, 2020, granted Petric a new trial and ordered Petric brought back to the Jefferson County Jail to be held until the conclusion of his new trial.

Petric was booked back into the county lockup on Feb. 3, 2022, and remains held, awaiting transfer back to state prison.