A federal appeals court has upheld Missouri’s law that limits the rights of prisoners to appeal sentences if the prisoners became fugitives after conviction and before sentencing.

Convicted killer Alan Echols was on the lam for eight years before he was caught in 1999 and sentenced to life in prison.  He’d been convicted of stabbing a man 60 times, killing him in Kansas City in 1990.

Echols had claimed the escape law is enforced arbitrarily. The State Court of Appeals rejected that argument and now a federal court has upheld a judge who refused to hear a further appeal.