A man who spent more than three decades in prison for a murder he says he didn't commit had nothing to lose - but made precious gains - by falsely confessing to the crime, his lawyer says.

Admitting to the 1967 murder of an Ottawa firefighter brought Romeo Phillion notoriety and some final "tender" moments with the person for whom he cared most deeply, Neil Miller, a teenage drag queen, the Ontario Court of Appeal heard yesterday.

"The pivot point of this whole case we're still dealing with 41 years after the homicide is how and why the appellant came to utter the words that changed his life on Jan. 11, 1972," Philip Campbell, a lawyer representing Phillion, told a three-judge panel.

"We have to consider a counterintuitive explanation if logical explanations fail," he said.

Freed on bail five years ago, Phillion, 69, is asking the court to quash his conviction for non-capital murder in the death of Leopold Roy, 48. The linchpin of the Crown's case against Phillion was a confession he uttered but quickly recanted at an Ottawa police station.

That validity of that confession is still very much in dispute, with experts for Phillion and the Crown offering conflicting opinions.

Wearing a grey sweatshirt, Phillion listened from the front row yesterday as his lawyer described him as a "hapless" small-time hoodlum back in 1972.

Prior to uttering the murder confession, he'd been arrested on a charge of robbing a taxi driver and faced the prospect of a long stretch in prison - his fourth.

Weak, impulsive and irrational, with a history of coping poorly with emotional strain, Phillion was "losing his grip to some extent," Campbell argued, adding there were signs his client may have felt that offering up a murder confession could only help - not hurt.

As a condition of signing a statement admitting to the killing, Phillion asked investigators to bring Miller to an interview room, where the two had a final tearful meeting and spoke in whispers. They kissed. Miller said "I love you," then left.

In addition to allowing him to see Miller one last time, Phillion's confession to a crime that had been on the front page of newspapers meant he got to "cast himself in tragic and heroic terms," Campbell said. "He goes to prison as a somebody. He'll be on the news."

"There's one fly in that ointment," Justice Michael Moldaver interjected at one point yesterday. Despite Campbell's claim that his client had little to lose, Phillion clearly was concerned about the consequences of confessing because he asked police if he could "hang" for the crime, Moldaver said.

Meanwhile, Justice James MacPherson rhymed off a list of facts about the crime that Phillion mentioned to police, including the street where the murder took place.

"They are dead accurate," MacPherson said, questioning Campbell on how a confession with such "an astonishing amount of detail" could possibly be considered false.

Most of the details were reported in the papers at the time of the killing, Campbell said.

But MacPherson suggested it was unlikely Phillion would remember them when he confessed four years later.

"I can tell you where I was the night the Red Sox won the World Series four years ago. But to reconstruct ... everything I did that day? Impossible," he said.

Campbell, however, told the court there is "nothing" in the Phillion's confession that would have been known exclusively by the killer.

The hearing continues.