Three years ago, Cory Mitchell was living a dream. A strapping 6-foot-1, 266-pound starting linebacker for St. John’s University, he was about to become a father for the first time and hoped to play in the NFL.

In the early morning hours of March 11, 2001 – in a world that didn’t yet know the horror of 9/11 – his dream turned into a nightmare. Gunshots left him paralyzed and in a wheelchair.

Doctors say he will never walk again. The way things have been going in the courts, he may never get justice.

That night, Mr. Mitchell, then 22, was at a party in a bar near the St. John’s campus in Queens when a rowdy group of eight to 10 young men picked a fight. Mr. Mitchell and his friends argued with them. Hard looks were exchanged, and the rowdies were tossed out.

It seemed to be over.

It wasn’t. When the party broke up at 2:30 a.m., Mr. Mitchell and some student friends piled into a car to head back to campus. They had company. The angry young men from the bar followed them to a parking lot behind some dormitories. One man wildly waved a baseball bat; another had a .45-caliber gun. The gunman, wearing a dark leather jacket and braids, squeezed off five shots – two into the air and three into crowd. Mr. Mitchell was hit in the spine.

“It was like a plane landed on my back,” Mr. Mitchell would say later. “Just pain. I can’t even describe it. It was crazy.”

What has happened since has also been crazy. A day after the shooting, police arrested a man named Christopher Prince and charged him with being the gunman. Mr. Mitchell has repeatedly identified him as the shooter, as have several other witnesses, including that bat-wielding man who instigated the fight.

Two juries have been unable to see through the fog of conflicting – and sometimes changing – testimony and have failed to convict Prince, a felon who’s doing four years for an unrelated shooting. One jury voted nine to three for conviction; the other voted eight to four, also for conviction.

The third trial, and the wheels of justice, are grinding on in courtroom 190 in State Supreme Court in Kew Gardens, Queens. The latest jury should get the case this week, and Mr. Mitchell is getting angry and more frustrated by the minute.

“That’s the dude who put me in this chair,” Mr. Mitchell told jurors last week as he pointed at Prince, Newsday reported. “He shot me. I know what he looks like.”

Mr. Mitchell recited a list of painkillers he must take constantly. “Every day,” Mr. Mitchell testified. “Every day my legs hurt. My leg hurts. My back hurts. My pride hurts … . I’ll never walk again.”

Prince, now 25, also waits for justice. If he is innocent – he insists he wasn’t even there that night – he, too, has been denied justice. His latest jurors know this. What they don’t know is that he was convicted of gun charges in connection with shooting at another man in a dispute in front of a house in St. Albans in March 2003. They don’t know about that because it has been deemed irrelevant and prejudicial to this case. If they did, they’d probably convict him in a heartbeat.

In the St. John’s case, Prince’s lawyers contend the shooter was Eric Mateo, a former friend who led police to Prince. Mr. Mateo has testified against Prince at the trials, as have several other witnesses.

Prince’s lawyer, Neville Mitchell, says police have the wrong man and that prosecutors are wasting tax dollars by continuing to retry him.

“He wasn’t there at all,” Neville Mitchell says, naming Mr. Mateo as the shooter. “And Mateo is still out there; still hurting people with baseball bats and whatnot.”

He also thinks prosecutors will try his client a fourth time if they don’t win a conviction this time: “They’re not going to give up until some judge says, ‘That’s enough.'”

Prince’s mother, Ionie, testified last week that her son was home that night – at least when she went to sleep at around 12:30 a.m. and when she awoke at around 10 a.m. She says she prays for Cory Mitchell, but is sure her son is not guilty.

Cory Mitchell is equally sure Prince shot him. Most of the jurors at the first two trials agreed with him, but it’s all or nothing in criminal trials and so he continues to wait for justice with a combination of anger and weariness.

“I’m just tired,” he told a Daily News reporter last week after he testified. “Tired and want it over.”