This is an opinion column.

How many voices, how many cries?

How many prayers, how many tears?

How many years?

Toforest Johnson certainly hasn’t lost count, not of the years. Nor probably the months or days. He’s lived on Alabama’s Death Row since 1998 when he was 25. Since being convicted of murdering Jefferson County Sheriff’s Deputy William Hardy, a 23-year veteran officer, three years earlier in the parking lot of what was then the Crown Sterling Suites hotel where Hardy worked a second job as a security guard.

Convicted despite evidence that would evoke eye rolls from a Law & Order jury. Despite a key witness who didn’t know Johnson testifying she heard someone claiming to be “Toforest” confess to the killing on a three-way call with her daughter with someone at the county jail. A compromised (now-deceased) key witness whom investigators did not originally believe and was later revealed to have been paid $5,000 to be the state’s witness.

Convicted despite nary a strand, thread, or drop of physical evidence.

Despite (of course, this is not unusual) Johnson’s insistent and repeated denial of the crime.

He’s remained on Death Row despite, too, a deafening chorus of cries that Johnson is innocent. That he should not have been convicted of the crime. Cries that, at minimum, he should be granted a new trial.

That he should not be on Death Row.

More than three years ago, former Alabama Attorney General Bill Baxley called Johnson’s trial and conviction “deeply flawed.”

“[T]he evidence presented against him is so thin, that no Alabamian should tolerate his incarceration, let alone his execution,” Baxley wrote in the Washington Post. “An innocent man is trapped on Alabama’s death row.”

That’s one voice. Just one. There are many others, so many in this choir of concern.

Jefferson County District Attorney Danny Carr (he wasn’t DA when Johnson was tried) has long called for Johnson to be granted a new trial, saying four years ago after an extensive investigation into the case his “duty to seek justice requires intervention in this case.” Last week, Carr filed an amicus brief supporting Johnson in the county court where Johnson’s future—his life—rests. A motion for a new trial, filed by Johnson’s attorneys, is before Jefferson County Circuit Judge Kandice Pickett.

Citing additional evidence supporting Johnson’s innocence, Carr wrote in the brief: “It has not been possible, until recently, to fully appreciate the full extent to which the foundation of this conviction has disintegrated.”

In between, the chorus was joined by copious voices. Most notably Jeff Wallace—the man who prosecuted the case against Johnson, who now supports Carr’s call for correction.

There are other Alabama public officials. A former governor. Two former state Supreme Court Chief justices and another former member of the state’s highest court. A former U.S. attorney. Another DA and a former DA. And a Kardashian, of course.

There are jurors. Three of the men and women who convicted Johnson. Monique Hicks’s tune shifted, she wrote in a guest column published on AL.com in April, upon learning Wallace was calling for a new trial. “My role in the wrongful conviction of an innocent man keeps me awake at night,” Hicks wrote.

There are the compelling voices gathered by former Alabama television journalist Beth Shelborne in her podcast “Earwitness”—so named for the compromised key witness. Listen to it and tell me you believe Toforest Johnson should die.

There are, too, voices vociferously arguing Johnson’s conviction was just. That he should remain on death row until Gov. Kay Ivey decides he should die.

Last October, the hard-right U.S. Supreme Court refused to review his case.

Before the ruling, our state’s top attorney was (and remains) the petulant child covering his ears to block out the chorus’ crescendo and intoning the expected: The suit, Steve Marshall’s office wrote and maintains, “[did] not raise an issue of extraordinary public importance or any compelling circumstances.”

No issue except justice. Nothing compelling except a man’s life—in a state that puts people to death as giddily as kids eat Skittles.

There is only one voice left to rise. In time, maybe soon, Judge Pickett will rule on the motion requesting a new trial.

Predicting judicial decisions is foolish, yet at the risk….

How could she not? How could Judge Pickett not grant it?

How could she not hear the chorus and cries?

Hear what we all hear.

I’m a member of the National Association of Black Journalists Hall of Fame and a Pulitzer Prize finalist for commentary. My column appears on AL.com, as well as the Lede. Tell me what you think at [email protected], and follow me at twitter.com/roysj, or on Instagram @roysj.