LAS VEGAS - If Sandy Murphy wasn't guilty of murdering her live-in boyfriend Ted Binion, she can't be guilty of conspiring to steal the casino mogul's buried silver fortune, Murphy's lawyer told a Nevada Supreme Court panel Thursday.

"The state's theory of the case has always been consistent, that … Sandra Renee Murphy conspired with Rick Tabish to kill Ted Binion and then take the silver," said Murphy's lawyer, Michael Cristalli.

"In order to have a conviction on conspiracy to commit burglary and conspiracy to commit grand larceny and the subsequent offenses against her, you must have a conviction on the murder," Cristalli said. "Absent that, you have absolutely no evidence to support a conviction on those charges."

Steven Owens, a chief deputy Clark County district attorney, responded that the conspiracy was clear.

"The object of the conspiracy was to go dig up the silver out in the desert," he said, arguing that even after being acquitted on murder charges, Murphy and Tabish deserved their convictions on felony conspiracy, burglary and grand larceny charges.

Each was sentenced in 2005 to one to five years in state prison, although Murphy, who served nearly four years on her original murder conviction, remains free pending her appeal.

"Just because the jury did not return a verdict of guilty on the murder counts, doesn't mean you take all that evidence and just wipe it away," Owens said.

Neither Murphy, now 35 and living in California, nor Tabish, 42 and serving a Nevada state prison term on separate extortion charges, appeared for the hearing.

But amid the legal back-and-forth were echoes of fireworks that drew headlines during their sensational murder trials - the saga of a former stripper and her secret lover first convicted and then acquitted of murdering the wealthy but troubled 55-year-old son of legendary Las Vegas casino owner Benny Binion.

Ted Binion died in 1998. Prosecutors said Murphy and Tabish forced him to ingest lethal levels of heroin and the antidepressant Xanax before suffocating him. They were convicted of murder in 2000, but granted a new trial in 2003 and acquitted of murder charges in 2004.

"Frankly, the record of appeal in this case is terrible," Justice James Hardesty declared in an unusually blunt criticism less than two minutes into Cristalli's presentation. Hardesty said citations and transcripts from lower court proceedings were not provided to the high court.

Cristalli said outside court he believed Hardesty was citing a narrow issue, not the core of his argument that the evidence was insufficient to support Murphy's conviction.

Michael Schwarz, Tabish's new attorney, also faced tough questions when he told the justices that Tabish's 2004 silver theft conviction should be overturned on technical grounds.

"Nye County should have had jurisdiction in this case," Schwarz said. He referred to the site of a buried vault in Pahrump, some 60 miles west of Las Vegas, where Tabish was found several days after Binion's death, having dug up some of an estimated $7 million in silver that Binion had hidden there.

The trio of justices did not make an immediate ruling. But they appeared intimately familiar with the case the state high court reversed in 2003 when it ruled that evidence about a separate extortion case unfairly prejudiced the jury.

As Schwarz began, Hardesty stopped him, referred to the court's decision to consolidate cases for its earlier decision, and cited shortcomings in the new appeals.

"Why shouldn't we simply deny … because of failure to raise the issues on appeal?" Hardesty said.

Schwarz said he believed issues were properly raised, and then spent several minutes criticizing what he called the state's "cavalier" attitude and approach to the case. He asked the court to grant Tabish prison credit for jail time served after his arrest in Pahrump.

Owens also came in for hard questions from Hardesty about whether the silver theft charges initially filed and dropped in Nye County should have been filed again in Nye County.

"Everything originated here and ended here," Owens responded, referring to Las Vegas and citing the conspiracy that prosecutors alleged led to Binion's death and the theft of his silver.

"All that plotting occurred in Clark County and carried out in Las Vegas," he said.