He’s serving 315 years for killing 6 people when he was 16 — but just won a victory

A New Jersey man in prison for six murders that took place when he was a teen will have new shot at fighting his 315-year sentence.

Convicted murderer Llewelyn James secured a small but important victory in a state Superior Court ruling this week — a first step toward a longshot chance at undermining the massive sentence he's serving for what prosecutors had called one of the worst killing sprees in New Jersey history.

According to an Associated Press report from 2007, James had confessed to killing six people — including his aunt and her companion — over two days in 2002.

But James maintained his innocence, claiming he'd made a false confession, afraid of a cousin who James claimed really killed four people, the report said at the time. James' trial lawyer had suggested a friend of James' killed the other two.

James was accused of killing his aunt's 30-year-old companion Absalom Giddings, after arguing with him. He allegedly killed the others — aunt Una Bethune, 30; and guests Donald Mays, 42, and Corlis Williams, 43 — in their home in Winslow Township in February of 2002, because they were witnesses.

According to a Courier-Post report in 2014 citing court records, those at the home had been smoking crack when the killings occurred.

He was accused of killing two other men — .Kasim Dale, 24, and Chris Ferguson III, 37 — who he thought were witnesses, the AP reported at the time. He was also accused of shooting a man in Lindenwold in a drug deal gone wrong.

"What did my son do to you for you to do this to him?" NJ.com quoted Donald Mays Sr. asking James during his sentencing hearing. "And I don't believe he could even answer that because he didn't even know my son."

In his taped confession, played at trial, he said he planned to rob Giddings.

He was convicted on six counts of murder, four counts of felony murder, one count of attempted murder and several weapons charges.

James had already lost an appeal on the charges, as well as a petition to get the state Supreme Court to hear his appeal. And he'd lost an application for post-conviction relief — usually a last-ditch effort to lessen a sentence, get a new trial or even secure release, most commonly by arguing a trial attorney hadn't been effective. It's the state-level equivalent of a federal habeas corpus petition.

But James took the case a step further — saying not just that his trial counsel was ineffective, but that his PCR was effective in demonstrating how his trial attorney fell down on the job.. And this week, a superior court agreed.

According to the court, James had maintained his trial attorney didn't provided him with discovery, didn't call his mother or a cousin as witnesses and didn't hire an investigator to examine the case.

"Thus, the defense was left only with the hope of poking holes in the state's case," the PCR attorney, tasked with making the case for the trial attorney's failings, wrote in an earlier brief.

But the PCR attorney never even dealt with the failure to call witnesses in his own filings. The PCR attorney also didn't make a case for how giving the defendant the state's discovery or hiring an investigator might have helped James' case, the court wrote.

The superior court said it wasn't even clear the PCR attorney ever reviewed the discovery.

And the PCR attorney didn't submit any affidavits from the mother or cousin to the PCR court, the superior court wrote. James had never, in his own affidavit, suggested what they'd say to help his case — but argued they'd help prove the trial attorney was ineffective.

The upshot: James will get another PCR hearing, where he'll have the chance to argue once again his trial attorney wasn't effective.

The ruling doesn't give the PCR court and guidance on how it should rule — it could still deny James' claim that the trial attorney was ineffective. And even if a PCR court agreed with him, there's no guarantee how it would address the claim, or how it would ultimately affect his sentence. But it could, conceivably, order a new trial if it found the trial attorney fell short.