Christopher Dunn spent 33 years in prison for a murder he claimed from the beginning that he did not commit. A hearing this week will decide whether he should be released.
Prosecutors in St. Louis are confident Dunn is telling the truth, but attorneys with the Missouri attorney general’s office want to keep him in prison. Dunn, 52, is serving a life sentence at the state prison in Rocking, Missouri. The defendant appeared at his trial before Judge Jason Sennheiser on Tuesday wearing a gray suit.
Missouri law adopted in 2021 allows prosecutors to request such a hearing if they find evidence of a wrongful conviction. St. Louis Circuit Attorney Gabe Gore filed a motion in February to set aside the 1990 guilty verdict, citing “clear and convincing evidence of Christopher Dunn’s actual innocence.”
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Dunn was convicted of first-degree murder in the death of 15-year-old Rico Rogers, based primarily on the testimony of two boys who claimed to have witnessed the shooting – they were 12 and 14 at the time – but later recanted, claiming they had been coerced by police and prosecutors.
Booker Shaw, a private attorney representing the circuit prosecutor, said in his opening statement Tuesday that at the time of the shooting, Dunn was watching television with his mother and sister at his mother’s house a few blocks away.
Assistant Attorney General Tristin Estep said neither police nor prosecutors coerced any witnesses to testify against Mr. Dunn, and that no matter how his testimony changed, the evidence showed he was the shooter. He said he was deaf.
“For the past 34 years, Christopher Dunn has been crafting stories, but not compelling stories,” Estep said.
Christopher Dunn is pictured in this photo provided by Kira Dunn. (Kira Dunn, via AP)
In May 2023, then-St. Paul’s Louis Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner filed a motion to vacate the sentence against Dunn. 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 have the conviction overturned.
Dunn, who is black, was 18 years old when Rogers was shot and killed on the night of May 18, 1990. Although there was no physical evidence linking Dunn to the crime, two boys told police at the time that they saw Dunn standing in the hallway. They arrived at the neighbor’s house a few minutes before the gunshots rang out.
According to court records, Rogers and the two boys heard the gunshots and fled, but Rogers suffered fatal injuries.
The judge has heard Dunn’s acquittal case before.
At an evidentiary hearing in 2020, Judge William Hickle agreed that the jury was likely to find Dunn not guilty based on the new evidence. However, Hickle said at the time that a 2016 Missouri Supreme Court ruling ruled that death row inmates like Dunn, who are sentenced to life without the possibility of parole, are not the only ones who can “independently” assert actual innocence. Citing this, he refused to assert Dunn’s innocence.
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Last February, a St. Louis judge overturned the conviction of Lamar Johnson, who had served nearly 28 years in prison for a murder he had said he did not commit. Another man in the case testified that he, not Johnson, took part in the murder, a witness said police “blackmailed” him into getting involved, and Johnson’s then-girlfriend said he was the one who took part in the murder that night. The two testified that they were together.
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In January, St. Louis County Prosecutor Wesley Bell filed a motion to vacate the conviction of Marcellus Williams, who narrowly escaped lethal injection seven years ago for stabbing Lisha Gale to death in 1998. According to Bell’s motion, three experts determined that Williams’ DNA was not on the handle of the butcher knife used in the killing.
