text: During the robbery, an employee of the restaurant triggered a silent alarm after Workman granted her request to stand up to relieve a cramp in her leg. Three Memphis police officers, Ronald Oliver, Aubrey Stoddard, and Steven Parker, responded to the alarm. Upon their arrival, Workman attempted to flee across a nearby parking lot, where Lieutenant Ronald Oliver was then shot and killed.
  1982 trial
  Workman was charged with the murder of Lieutenant Oliver. At the 1982 trial, Officers Stoddard and Parker testified that they had not fired their weapons, but that they had not seen Workman shoot Lt. Oliver. The prosecution presented testimony from an alleged eyewitness, Harold Davis, who stated that he had parked his car in the restaurant parking lot and was 10 feet away when he saw Workman shoot Oliver. The defense lawyers accepted the police version, conducted no forensic or ballistics analysis and did not investigate Davis. At the sentencing phase of the trial, they presented no mitigating evidence, for example, of the physical abuse Workman had suffered as a child, and his drug addiction as an adult. Workman was found guilty of murder during the commission of a felony by the jury (under the "felony murder" rule). The jury recommended a sentence of death, finding five statutory aggravating circumstances: