JACKSON - David Williams, who is currently serving a life sentence for the 2005 murder of a University of Mississippi student, will argue for a new trial in an Aug. 4 hearing before the Mississippi Court of Appeals.

The case is among dozens the court will consider during the July-August term.

Williams was convicted of murder in Lafayette County in 2007 and sentenced to life with parole. A judge denied Williams a new trial in 2008.

Williams had contended that the stabbing death of 21-year-old Demetria Bracey was part of a mutual suicide pact.

Bracey was a senior French major who was just weeks from graduating when she was killed. Her body, with a stab wound in the chest, was found in a closet of Williams' Oxford apartment. Authorities said her body had been covered by clothes.

Among the issues raised by Williams in his motion for a new trial was that the jury didn't hear the testimony from an Episcopal priest. The trial judge allowed the priest, the Rev. Ollie Rencher, to claim priest-penitent privilege about communications he had with Bracey.

According to the court record, shortly after Bracey's death, Rencher volunteered a statement to Oxford police about what he knew of Bracey, saying she had told him she had thought about suicide and he had recommended she get help.

Williams also raised issues that his lawyer should have done a better job. Among the issues cited were his attorney's failure to call the defendant as a witness, failure to get Bracey's medical records and failure to object to inclusion of her death certificate into evidence because the document concluded her death was a homicide.