FG PCT. Sue Bird. PTS 5. AST 5. Tina Charles. PTS 4. Jewell Loyd Is Eyeing the Olympics. Allisha Gray. REB 4. Stefanie Dolson. Kelsey Plum. PTS 6. REB 1. AST 1. Katie Lou Samuelson. PTS 3. Featured 3x3 Articles. Quotes: U. Olympic 3x3 Team July Olympic 3x3 Team Golden. Olympic 3x3 Team Falls to Host Japan Professional Notes: Drafted : No. All-WNBA second team: All-WCBA first team: Wooden Award.
Award First three-time winner of the State Farm Wade Trophy , , ; in winning in , became just the second sophomore to earn the distinction. Gatorade Georgia Player of the Year , An all-county track and field athlete, with a regional high jump title 5'8" and a state runner-up finish in For more than 20 years, the Missouri justice system had not agreed.
And entering this year, Moore's commitment begged a question:. Why was one of the greatest players of all time willing to never step on a court again -- and to leave behind one of the WNBA's great dynasties -- for the sake of what could well be a lost cause? It was around p. Louis, to change his clothes before heading back out for a hair appointment. After walking through the door, he ventured toward the back of the house, to his bedroom. It was then, according to his testimony in Irons' original trial, that he heard the latch of the closet door.
Stotler testified that he knew something was wrong. Frightened, Stotler slowly reached under his mattress and pulled out a 9 mm semi-automatic pistol he owned. He loaded a magazine, put a shell in the chamber and pointed it at the closet door. He called out to the intruder, imploring the person to come out. Stotler reached for the phone on his nightstand, calling out once more, this time to alert the intruder that he was calling the police.
Seconds later, the closet door flew open, and Stotler saw a young black man whom he would later identify in court as Jonathan Irons. Stotler testified that as he turned his eyes away to look at his phone, he was shot in the shoulder and fell to his bedroom floor.
As he tried to stand, he was shot again, this time in the temple. He struggled to find his gun, which he'd dropped as he collapsed to the ground. Once he grabbed it, Stotler fired once in the direction of the closet. Bleeding from bullet wounds to his face and right shoulder, Stotler managed to get to his kitchen, where he called He did not see the intruder again.
Stotler was rushed to the hospital and underwent emergency brain surgery. He remained there for the next seven weeks. At the time of his testimony, in October , he still had bullet fragments lodged in his brain. Although Stotler identified Irons in court, he had not been able to do so immediately following the burglary. According to testimony from Detective John Neske, O'Fallon police were originally alerted to thenyear-old Irons as a possible suspect because he had been seen that day in the neighborhood by a number of witnesses.
Irons, who declined to comment for this story, testified at the Oct. By that time, Irons had dropped out of high school, but he had friends and acquaintances -- including those to whom he sold marijuana -- in the area. According to his testimony from that October hearing, Irons acknowledged that he'd been in the neighborhood that night with a gun, which Irons says was a. Stotler had been shot with a. Louis Post-Dispatch that Irons was named a suspect after mentioning the shooting to a friend.
Irons has denied this allegation. The gun that was used to shoot Stotler was never recovered. Despite telling Neske in February that he was uncertain about who shot him, Stotler would later identify Irons at a pretrial hearing.
No DNA or fingerprints belonging to Irons were found at the scene. Despite the lack of physical evidence, Irons was convicted of burglary and assault in , after being tried as an adult because of a previous charge.
Moore lived in Missouri's capital until she was 11, then moved with her mother to Charlotte, North Carolina, before settling in Atlanta the following year. It's always been the two of them. Even today, they live next door to each other.
While growing up as a basketball phenom in Georgia, Moore had also begun to explore her faith. She'd gone to church with her mother since she was a child but says that in middle school she focused more attention on her faith after her mom lost her job, which had brought them to Atlanta.
Moore and her mom began attending World Changers Church International, a nondenominational global ministry headquartered in Atlanta. The church's pastor, Creflo Dollar, is known for preaching "prosperity gospel" -- that faith in God can lead to material gain and help followers triumph over adversity.
It was Moore who encouraged her mother to take them to church every Sunday in Atlanta. Without a relationship with her biological father, Moore says she found her identity in God. He is what matters most about who I am. I've become such a believer in the beauty and power and need for fathers, especially godly fathers. And whatever our culture says, I'm convinced that the best way for kids to grow up is with their mom and their dad.
Moore has never been public about her relationship with her father, Mike Dabney, who was a star basketball player at Rutgers in the s. The identity she found in the wake of Dabney's absence became foundational to the person who put on a basketball jersey nearly every day for most of her life. Moore attended Collins Hill High School in Suwanee, Georgia, a suburb of Atlanta, where she won three state championships and led her team to a record.
She received the Naismith Prep Player of the Year Award her junior and senior seasons, becoming one of only two players to win the award multiple times. Maya always had this presence that maybe she was born with. Your eyes were always drawn to her. Moore has long said that her faith has been as integral to her athletic success as her skill itself.
While a student, Moore regularly participated in campus Bible study sessions. Following her freshman year, she attended AIA's Ultimate Training Camp, which merges athletic competition with faith exploration in a summer camp environment.
She worked as an intern at the camp for two additional summers. Moore's faith, sources close to her say, shaped her journey to becoming one of the greatest basketball players in the world. By all accounts, that same faith in God, and in justice, gave her the strength to walk away. It's been 10 months since Irons' legal team filed the petition that led to this hearing and over a decade since Reggie Williams, Moore's godfather, discovered a piece of evidence that Irons' team plans to present today.
According to The New York Times, Moore had seen Reggie reviewing Irons' legal documents during a family vacation in her senior year of high school, became interested in the case and visited Irons in prison for the first time during that summer of Back in August, after months of motions and extensions and exhibit filings and updates, Green, the judge, had set this date to hear arguments in the case.
Today, Irons' legal team begins by calling Reggie Williams to the stand. Williams' testimony focuses on the longevity of his relationship with Irons and his intimate knowledge of the path Irons has taken through the legal system following his conviction. Williams, who has worked for State Farm for 33 years in both underwriting and claims investigation, says Irons gave him power of attorney in , after he had shown a keen interest in the case, and Williams spent years poring over the materials contained in the three boxes of evidence given to him.
In , he took these materials to a University of Missouri law professor, who referred Williams to one of his students for help. They then filed a records request, which led them to the O'Fallon Police Department to review additional files. Williams, who declined to comment for this story, testified that once they were allowed inside the police department, Williams asked to see police reports. He was handed a blue folder stuffed with documents. He paged through them and discovered something that caught his eye.
Irons' team then calls Irons' original defense attorney, Christine Sullivan. The report, Irons' lawyers argue, raises questions about the conduct of the prosecution in Irons' original trial. The document is not the same report that was given to Irons' defense attorney in At the time of Irons' trial, the fingerprint report indicated that the two fingerprints found on the storm door leading out of Stotler's home belonged to Stotler. But this report, which Williams found two years into his investigation, indicates that only one of those prints was Stotler's.
The other, this report reveals, doesn't belong to Irons. A choked sob comes from the corner of the room. Tears stream down Irons' cheeks as he gasps for air. This is the argument upon which Irons' appeal hinges.
Moore presses her lips together and grips the railing in front of her. Her knuckles tighten and the tension ripples up her forearm. Green calls for a recess.
The room empties. Moore stands in the hallway surrounded by her family. Irons is off to the side, flanked by corrections officers. They aren't allowed to speak to each other. Twenty-one years after his conviction, Irons has finally received another day in court, but he will have to wait weeks, maybe months, to find out if Green believes him.
The Lynx were and preparing to face the Connecticut Sun for the first time that season. The night before, on July 6, Philando Castile, a cafeteria supervisor at J. Hill Montessori School, was shot and killed by a police officer in Falcon Heights, Minnesota, a suburb just east of Minneapolis.
His death came just one day after year-old Alton Sterling was killed by police in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, in the same neighborhood where Augustus grew up. Since the death of Michael Brown, an year-old black man, on Aug. But the deaths of Sterling and Castile struck a specific chord for the Lynx, both because they came so close together and because they occurred in familiar and cherished places.
In a moment that echoes now, almost four years later, Reeve looked to her captains. After the game, on the bus to the airport, the answer began to take shape. Moore and Brunson led the conversation in the following days, Moore guiding her teammates through the process of choosing the words they wanted to use. She proposed where to put them on the T-shirts they eventually debuted on July 9, -- three days after Castile's death -- during warm-ups for a home game against the Dallas Wings.
In bold white letters, "Black Lives Matter" stood out on the back, underneath the names and shield. The Lynx's public display sparked demonstrations across the league. Later that summer, 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick began to kneel during the national anthem. After the Lynx's demonstration, the league had sent out a memo reminding teams of the uniform policy. The Lynx never wore the shirts again.
The WNBA's most dominant team had walked out on a limb, but not far enough to snap the branch. But for Moore, something was giving way. Her relationship with Irons and her belief in his innocence had long been a personal conviction and a private cause, she told ESPN's Dan Le Batard in April, but the events of showed her that she could have an impact on issues of criminal justice publicly.
For six long years, Maya Moore had been consumed by chasing basketball success without respite. Without time to be with her family. Without time to get Jonathan Irons out of prison.
Moore had played in the Rio Olympics three months earlier, in July, winning her second gold medal. When considering the motivations for why she stepped away from the game a year ago, it is worth acknowledging: Maya Moore was exhausted. After consecutive days of two-a-days in Fort Lauderdale in the spring of , Whalen and Moore took a night off. They'd booked a suite at the Hilton Fort Lauderdale Beach Resort and decided to have dinner at Ilios, the hotel's restaurant.
It was during a conversation there that Moore first told Whalen about Irons -- and her family's advocacy on his behalf. She told Whalen about the case. About her godparents. About what she saw as the injustice facing a man she considered family.
About how other than training, this was what she'd been focused on all offseason. About how personal this fight was to her. Can this one superprospect revive the greatest dynasty in sports? During the October evidentiary hearing -- when the fingerprint evidence was presented and the case reexamined -- excitement and relief had filled the room.
Today, a rainy Monday in central Missouri, the hearing takes all of five minutes. Green orders the fingerprints, the ones discovered by Reggie Williams in , to be run through a process called the Automated Fingerprint Identification System, a central database used by law enforcement to identify people whose prints had previously been entered into the system -- but those results won't be ready for weeks. The fingerprints are crucial to Irons' case for several reasons.
They could belong to someone else in the system, casting further doubt on whether Irons committed the crime. But in the state of Missouri, a person's innocence is, in some ways, irrelevant. Legal precedent in the state holds that unless a prisoner is on death row, proven innocence is not reason enough to be set free. Petitioners must prove that they have been denied a constitutionally adequate trial. To that end, the existence of the report as new evidence could also be enough to prove that Irons had his rights constitutionally violated -- and therefore his conviction could be void.
That's because the suppression or altering of the fingerprint document could constitute a violation of the Brady rule, which mandates that the prosecution turn over all exculpatory evidence to the defense pretrial. Failure to do so is a violation of a defendant's due process. But even a ruling in Irons' favor does not guarantee his release. The state could appeal, or he could be retried. And so this is how it goes. Process begets more process.
Hearings beget more hearings. Motions result in countermotions. Decisions are appealed, and that process can feel interminable -- and is one that even in the event of confirmed innocence does not guarantee freedom. Reeve walked past the towering glass behind the bar to a private room in the back, where she was joined by Lynx forward Rebekkah Brunson, who sat across the room.
The two dozen attendees had gathered at the behest of Moore, who had begun to speak more publicly about her commitment to criminal justice reform. She just quietly sat back and did the work. Moore wanted to introduce her social action campaign, Win With Justice, as well as highlight the work happening across the country to reform the criminal justice system. Reeve, who had coached Moore for all eight of her WNBA seasons, took her seat at dinner to support her star player.
This was the same player whose wingspan had been plastered on a downtown billboard in a rendering of Jordan's iconic pose. The same player who, nine months earlier, had delivered Reeve her fourth championship in seven years. Her sons step out of an adjacent car, both wearing suits. As the rain pours down, they scramble to take photos with one another. Cheri leaves them outside.
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