Catherine Rusoff
A hearing this week will determine whether Missouri inmate Christopher Dunn should be released after spending more than three decades in prison for a murder he has always said he did not commit. Dunn’s conviction and sentence of life in prison without parole depended on the testimony of two witnesses – a pre-teen and a young teenager – who have since admitted to lying during the trial.
St. Louis prosecutors are now convinced that Dunn is telling the truth, but lawyers from the Missouri Attorney General’s Office disagree and will advocate keeping him behind bars. Dunn, 52, is serving a life sentence without parole at the state prison in Locking, Missouri, but is scheduled to appear at a hearing before Judge Jason Sengheiser that begins Tuesday.
The hearing follows a motion filed in February by St. Louis Circuit Attorney Gabe Gore. A Missouri law adopted in 2021 allows prosecutors to request hearings in cases where they believe there is evidence of a wrongful conviction.
Dunn was convicted of first-degree murder in the 1990 death of 15-year-old Ricco Rogers based largely on the testimony of two boys who said they witnessed the shooting. The state’s eyewitnesses, ages 12 to 14 at the time, later recanted, claiming they were coerced by police and prosecutors.
Kira Dunn via AP, archive
“I couldn’t tell you who Ricco Rogers was to save my life,” Dunn told CBS News and “48 Hours” correspondent Erin Moriarty in a “CBS Mornings” segment last November. He introduced himself as “an innocent man who was in prison for a crime I did not commit and who is afraid that I will die in prison.”
Dunn, who by that time had suffered three heart attacks while incarcerated, said he was “trying to figure out what justice is in Missouri.”
Dunn said he was at home with his mother when Rogers was killed. Although there was no evidence to support the testimony of the two teenagers who claimed to have witnessed Rogers’ murder, Dunn was convicted of the crime during a speedy trial and has been in prison for 33 years.
Moriarty attributed Dunn’s continued incarceration to a quirk of Missouri law.
“If Dunn was on death row, he would already be at large. But he’s serving life in prison without parole, which is kind of the same thing,” Moriarty said. “But in Missouri, those sentenced to life in prison are not entitled to pleas of innocence, which leaves their fate in the hands of a prosecutor whose office put him behind bars in the first place.”
Court documents show that the two main witnesses in Dunn’s trial recanted their testimony in sworn statements that each admitted to perjuring themselves in 2005 and 2015, respectively. But Dunn remained in prison.
In May 2023, then-St. Louis Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner filed a motion to vacate Dunn’s sentence. But Gardner resigned days later, and after his appointment by Gov. Mike Parson, Gore wanted to conduct his own investigation. Gore announced in February that he would seek to overturn the conviction.
Dunn, who is black, was 18 years old when Rogers was shot to death on the night of May 18, 1990. No physical evidence linked Dunn to the crime, but both boys told police at the time that they saw Dunn standing in the walkway of the house next door. side, a few minutes before the shots were fired.
Rogers and the two boys ran when they heard the gunshots, but Roger was fatally shot, according to court records.
A judge has heard Dunn’s innocence case before.
At an evidentiary hearing in 2020, Judge William Hickle agreed that a jury would likely find Dunn not guilty based on new evidence. But Hickle refused to exonerate Dunn, citing a 2016 Missouri Supreme Court ruling that only death row inmates — and not those like Dunn sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole — could make an “independent” allegation. ” of real innocence.
The 2021 law resulted in the release of two men who spent decades in prison.
In 2021, Kevin Strickland was released after more than 40 years behind bars for three Kansas City murders after a judge ruled he had been wrongfully convicted in 1979.
Last February, a St. Louis judge overturned Lamar Johnson’s conviction, who spent almost 28 years in prison for a murder he always said he didn’t commit. At a hearing in December 2022, another man testified that it was he – not Johnson – who joined a second man in the murder. A witness testified that police “intimidated” him to implicate Johnson. And Johnson’s girlfriend at the time testified that they were together that night.
A hearing date is still pending in another case in which a Missouri murder conviction is being challenged by a man who was almost executed for the crime.
St. Louis County District Attorney Wesley Bell filed a motion in January to overturn the conviction of Marcellus Williams, who narrowly escaped lethal injection seven years ago for the fatal stabbing of Lisha Gayle in 1998. Bell’s motion it said three experts determined that Williams’ DNA was not on the handle of the butcher knife used in the murder.
