The Alaska Court of Appeals on Thursday will hear oral arguments to overturn the 2007 conviction of Mechele Linehan, serving a 99-year-sentence for the murder of her former fiance.

Linehan's lawyers are arguing that a jury wrongly convicted her because of evidence the judge improperly allowed into the trial, including Linehan's employment as a stripper. They say the trial wasn't about what Linehan did or didn't do, it was about her lifestyle as a 23-year-old stripper.

The state is countering that Linehan's employment as an exotic dancer was an important piece to the story of how she manipulated the men in her life, including how she convinced a man to commit the murder.

Two years ago, after a sensational trial watched by national media, a jury convicted Linehan of conspiring to kill Kent Leppink, a commercial fisherman shot to death in 1996. Prosecutors say she lured a man who was in love with her, John Carlin, to kill Leppink, for $1 million in life insurance money. Carlin was convicted separately.

Linehan is serving her sentence in the Hiland Mountain Correctional Center in Eagle River, the state's only prison for females. Her husband, Colin Linehan, who lives in Olympia, Wash., said her entire family is looking forward to her being exonerated.

From the beginning of the decade-long investigation, Linehan has said she's innocent. Shortly after Leppink's death, she left Alaska. She went to college, eventually earning a master's degree, marrying a doctor, starting a family and settling in Washington state. Her stripper career was far behind her when she was arrested in 2006.

The Alaska Appeals Court, a three-judge panel, cannot override a jury's decision because they disagree with it but they can decide the now 37-year-old's rights to a fair trial were denied. It is Linehan's best shot at overturning the conviction; the Alaska Supreme Court rarely hears criminal cases.

"We looked at this case closely and we would not have taken it on had we not concluded that there were serious and troubling questions about several rulings on evidence by the court and the fairness of the trial," said Jeff Feldman, a heavy-hitter attorney who decided to take on the appeal after Linehan's conviction.

Linehan's lawyers say Superior Court Judge Philip Volland erred in allowing the jurors to hear information about Linehan's exotic dancing at the Great Alaskan Bush Company club. It prejudiced the jurors against her, making her out to be a manipulative, cunning seductress who would murder for money, her lawyers say. This image was the dominant theme of the trial and it's what unfairly turned the jurors against her, the lawyers say.

"To make up for the absence of evidence on what Linehan did, the state relied extensively on evidence of who Linehan was," wrote her attorneys, Feldman, Susan Orlansky and Alex Bryner in their appeal brief. Bryner is a recently retired Alaska Supreme Court judge.

The state's response to the appeal defends the prosecutor and Volland's actions during the three-week trial. The case against Linehan was built on circumstantial evidence of her involvement in the life insurance purchase and e-mails between her and the victim. But no hard evidence -- the murder weapon, samples from the crime scene, or witnesses -- directly link Linehan to the crime.

Prosecutors say everything presented to the jurors was necessary to show how Linehan used men for money.

MAN MANIPULATOR

State prosecutors argue the jurors had to understand how she met the victim and Carlin. That's the relevance of Linehan's dancing at the Bush Company.

"It established Linehan's skills and experience in manipulating men," wrote Diane Wendlandt, the state appeals attorney. "Manipulating men was a skill essential to her profession."

Linehan's lawyers say that belief is built on an unfounded stereotype of exotic dancers.

They concede their client was no angel when she was 23 years old, dancing and connected to Carlin and Leppink. With older men swarming around her, access to easy money, shuttling between Anchorage and the Lower 48, there's no question Linehan lived her early 20s by grabbing all the glamor and fun she could. Her lawyers admit she led men on, that she was engaged to too many men in a short amount of time, some maybe overlapping, but that does not make her an accomplice to a murder.

The appeal also argues that "The Last Seduction," a 1994 film about a woman who manipulates a man to commit murder and gets the life insurance money, was another attempt by the prosecution to taint the jury's perception of Linehan, according to defense attorneys. Prosecutors suggest Linehan got the idea to kill Leppink after watching the movie and deciding she wanted to be just like the main character in it.

Volland allowed testimony about the noire movie in the trial until he watched it. After, he prohibited further testimony on it, concluding Leppink's murder and the murder in the movie were not very much alike, as the prosecution had purported.

But prosecutor Pat Gullufsen reminded the jury of the movie in his closing argument, and asked them to create a "true and ... just ending" different from the movie's ending.

LETTER FROM THE GRAVE

Besides the stripper and "The Last Seduction" references, Linehan's attorneys also argue that the "letter from the grave" that the victim wrote days before his death and sent to his parents should not have been brought up in trial because it, too, tainted the jury.

Leppink wrote to his parents that if he should end up dead, Linehan, Carlin or another man who was Linehan's boyfriend at the time, probably did it. He tells his parents that he's in love with Linehan and to "take her down" and make her pay for his death.

Her lawyers say that just because Leppink thought Linehan was going to kill him doesn't mean that she did.

Volland told jurors that they were to read the letter merely as an indication of how Leppink was feeling in the days before his death, that it showed evidence of how easily he was swayed and manipulated by Linehan.

But, Linehan's lawyers argue, despite whatever directions are given to a jury, a murder victim's accusation is very powerful and it is unrealistic to believe that a jury can refrain from considering that emotionally explosive material.

Prosecutors respond that the Leppink letter to his parents is highly relevant. It is evidence of the murder victim's state of mind, including his vulnerability to being manipulated by Linehan because of his feelings for her, they argue.

Written decisions on appeals typically follow within a year after oral argument.