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PASSAGE TWO OF THE DAY: "Strickland was freed Tuesday after Jackson County Prosecutor Jean Peters Baker argued he was innocent in a 1978 triple murder. Having spent more than 40 years behind bars, Strickland suffered the longest wrongful conviction in Missouri history. The AG’s office has fought just about every wrongful conviction claim to come before it in the last 20 years, according to one analysis. In Dunn’s case, its attorneys argued that Stepp’s and Davis’ “alleged recantations have demonstrated a willingness to say anything in hopes of some perceived benefit.” The AG’s office acknowledged the evidence against Dunn was “less clear than it was at trial,” but contended that the testimony from the boys was more reliable than their “incredible” recantations as lawbreaking adults. In his ruling, the judge in Texas County said he could not determine which of Stepp’s versions of events were true, but citing language from a previous innocence case, called the two witnesses “proven liars.” Hickle’s denial was devastating to Dunn’s loved ones, but they thought it provided a clear opportunity for the state Supreme Court to clarify whether innocence alone — without any constitutional violations — is enough to free prisoners not on death row. “We thought it was kind of a poster child case to finally knock over that crazy ruling,” Kira Dunn said of the Lincoln decision."
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STORY: "In Missouri, innocence is not enough to free the wrongfully convicted: Here' why," by Reporter Luke Nozicka, published by The Kansas City Star, on November 25, 2021.
GIST: After Chris Dunn’s attorneys presented evidence of his proclaimed innocence at a 2018 hearing in south central Missouri, a sheriff’s deputy who had been listening approached his mother and apologized.
“I’m so sorry … on behalf of the system that this happened to your son,” Dunn’s wife recalled the deputy said after the hearing in Texas County, where Dunn is imprisoned.
Dunn and his family felt optimistic.
By then, he had been imprisoned for more than 25 years for the 1990 fatal shooting of 14-year-old Ricco Rogers in St. Louis.
Dunn’s innocence appeared so obvious at the evidentiary hearing that a correctional officer turned to another and asked if they should call the prison to get his stuff ready to go, he said during a recent interview.
Judge William Hickle agreed a jury would likely find Dunn not guilty given his new evidence.
But he declined to exonerate him because it is unclear in Missouri if innocence alone is enough to free prisoners.
Dunn, now 49, would have been better off had he been awaiting execution, as opposed to his sentence of life in prison plus 90 years.
In denying Dunn’s petition, Hickle cited an appeals court decision in Lincoln v. Cassady, which lawyers say is a significant barrier to freeing innocent prisoners in the state.
It was in the case of Rodney Lincoln that the appeals court in 2016 said the Missouri Supreme Court had not recognized actual innocence as a reason to free a prisoner who was not facing death.
“Until Lincoln is overruled, innocent Missouri prisoners have no available judicial remedies to litigate and prove their innocence, which puts Missouri at odds with virtually every other state,” Dunn’s lawyers wrote in his June petition to the state Supreme Court, which declined to hear his case.
The ability to file a petition solely based on actual innocence has been established in other states, through case law or legislation, post-conviction attorneys say.
But that is not the case in Missouri.
Now, Dunn hopes St. Louis Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner reviews his case and agrees with his lawyers that he should be exonerated and freed.
Gardner’s office confirmed it has been in contact with Dunn’s family.
“We were just so, so, so, so hopeful,” his wife, Kira Dunn, said of the 2018 hearing. “I mean, I brought him clothes to go home in.”
WITNESSES RECANT:
Kira Dunn first met her now husband in 1999, when she was working as a volunteer staff writer for Justice Denied, an online outlet that calls itself the “magazine for the wrongly convicted.”
She was assigned to write about Dunn’s case.
She learned that no physical evidence tied him to the murder, which was carried out in the dark of night.
Instead, Dunn was convicted on the word of two boys — 14-year-old DeMorris Stepp and 12-year-old Michael Davis — who testified they saw Dunn, then 18, shoot and kill Rogers on the porch of a home at 5607 Labadie Ave.
At trial, prosecutors argued that Rogers was killed in a dispute among gang “wannabes,” the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported then.
In a recent call from prison, Dunn told The Star he was outside with his mother, uncle and siblings when they heard the gunshots three blocks away.
His mother said, “these fools out here shooting, let’s go,” and rushed them inside.
KIRA DUNN:
After a two-day trial in 1991, Dunn was convicted of first-degree murder, two counts of first-degree assault and three counts of armed criminal action. The jury returned its verdict after 45 minutes of deliberations, Kira Dunn said.
Chris Dunn has maintained his innocence, which Kira said was clear to her from the beginning.
She became an advocate for him.
They married in 2014. Over the years, both boys who testified against Dunn have recanted, according to his attorneys.
The first recantation came in 2005, when Stepp signed an affidavit saying he committed perjury when he testified that Dunn was the shooter.
He said he identified Dunn because he did not like him and because the police told him to do so.
A prosecutor also cut him a deal in an unrelated robbery case in exchange for his testimony, so he “lied on” Dunn to save himself, according to Dunn’s lawyers.
He got probation instead of prison time.
“I’m willing to come forward after all these years, because my conscious has been eating a way (sic) at me for all these years,” Stepp wrote, adding that he was a scared kid who didn’t know better. “I just want to do what is right now and tell the truth.”
Then in 2015, Davis, by then 38, said in an affidavit he also lied on the stand. He and Stepp did not see the shooter, but they decided to put it on Dunn because, he wrote, “it was rumored” that Dunn was the member of a rival gang — an accusation Kira Dunn said is false.
Davis recalled that before Dunn’s trial, he hesitated about his claim that he had seen the killer, so officers showed him photographs of Rogers’ bloody dead body, according to his affidavit.
They told him, “This is what he did to your partner,” Davis wrote, which felt like coercion to him.
Police also had the victim’s mother call Davis and pressure him to “help them get rid of this guy,” he wrote.
“That’s all it took to take away his life,” Kira Dunn said of the boys’ testimony. “Now they’re telling the truth, but somehow it’s not enough now.”
‘CRAZY RULING’:
When Dunn’s attorneys took his new evidence to court in 2018, Kira Dunn thought they brought far more to the table than what prosecutors used to convict him nearly 30 years earlier.
That evidence included testimony from a prisoner who said he overheard Stepp admit he didn’t know who killed his friend, as well as two of Dunn’s friends who said they were on the phone with him around the time of the murder.
One of those friends, Catherine Jackson, who was 16 at the time of the shooting, said she told a public defender about the call, but that her mother did not want her to testify at a murder trial.
“I remember Chris Dunn was happy and acting normal,” Jackson wrote in a 2016 affidavit, later adding: “It has always bothered me that this boy … was arrested for a murder he supposedly committed on the night I was talking to him for almost an hour on the phone.”
KIRA DUNN: Another witness testified that Rogers’ mother’s boyfriend had a motive, saying that three days before the shooting, some boys, including Rogers, beat the boyfriend up because he physically abused his mother.
In court filings, the Missouri Attorney General’s Office argued Dunn is guilty and received a fair trial.
The office said the boys who testified against Dunn are now “repeat criminal offenders” — Stepp is serving a life sentence in Missouri for killing a girlfriend and Davis did not testify at the 2018 hearing because he escaped from a California drug treatment center, making him a “fugitive from justice.”
“Stepp and Davis have now told inconsistent stories of Rogers’s death in which they recant their identification of Dunn as the shooter,” wrote Assistant Attorney General Andrew Crane, who had also been assigned to Kevin Strickland’s case.
Strickland was freed Tuesday after Jackson County Prosecutor Jean Peters Baker argued he was innocent in a 1978 triple murder.
Having spent more than 40 years behind bars, Strickland suffered the longest wrongful conviction in Missouri history.
The AG’s office has fought just about every wrongful conviction claim to come before it in the last 20 years, according to one analysis.
In Dunn’s case, its attorneys argued that Stepp’s and Davis’ “alleged recantations have demonstrated a willingness to say anything in hopes of some perceived benefit.”
The AG’s office acknowledged the evidence against Dunn was “less clear than it was at trial,” but contended that the testimony from the boys was more reliable than their “incredible” recantations as lawbreaking adults.
In his ruling, the judge in Texas County said he could not determine which of Stepp’s versions of events were true, but citing language from a previous innocence case, called the two witnesses “proven liars.”
Hickle’s denial was devastating to Dunn’s loved ones, but they thought it provided a clear opportunity for the state Supreme Court to clarify whether innocence alone — without any constitutional violations — is enough to free prisoners not on death row.
“We thought it was kind of a poster child case to finally knock over that crazy ruling,” Kira Dunn said of the Lincoln decision.
WHEN IS INNOCENCE ENOUGH?"
Missouri lawyers believed innocence was enough after Joe Amrine was exonerated from death row in 2003 for a prison murder he did not commit.
That was until freedom was denied to Rodney Lincoln — who maintained he was wrongly convicted in the 1982 killing of a St. Louis woman — because he was not facing the death penalty.
Amrine remains upset that a case bearing his name has been used to deny other prisoners freedom. When he was exonerated, he assumed his case would help other wrongly convicted Missourians — regardless of if they were sentenced to die or not. “I’m furious with that one,” Amrine said.
Lawyers across the state, as one put it, say the Lincoln decision is “just horrific on its face.”
“It doesn’t make any sense that somebody serving death by incarceration should be treated any differently than somebody on death row,” Kent Gipson, Dunn’s Kansas City-based attorney, previously told The Star. “The justice system shouldn’t be that way in a free country.”
Since then, the state’s highest court has appointed special masters to investigate innocence claims, which indicates it does believe actual innocence is a claim to free prisoners, legal experts say.
But with the lack of clarification from the state Supreme Court, lower courts across the state may come to different conclusions.
In 2019, Ricky Kidd was exonerated after he spent 23 years in prison for a 1996 double murder in Kansas City that he did not commit.
A DeKalb County judge ordered Kidd’s release after he determined Kidd’s innocence was “clear and convincing.”
But Kidd also won on another claim because prosecutors did not disclose evidence to his attorneys.
St. Louis-based attorney Liz Ramsey said each month, she has to turn down the cases of at least two to three prisoners who claim they are innocent because of the Lincoln decision. “You can’t argue actual innocence unless you’re on death row,” she said. “Innocence does not matter.”
‘THAT IS NOT JUSTICE’:
Dunn remains imprisoned at the South Central Correctional Center in Licking. He has spent more than 11,000 days behind bars as Missouri prisoner 181654. He fasts each year on the anniversary of Rogers’ murder and wants his family to know that “he did not take their child from them,” his wife said in a phone interview from California.
During an August rally outside the Missouri Supreme Court building, dozens of people called for the release of Dunn, Strickland and other prisoners who prosecutors or judges say are likely innocent.
Kira Dunn hadn’t planned to speak to the crowd, but when she got to the microphone, she read words recently written by her husband. “Missouri, I am one of you,” it started.
Chris Dunn — who has had three heart attacks in prison — wrote there was a strong possibility he would die here, “especially if I am still denied my freedom.”
He called Missouri a “proud state” that would “still rather defend” a wrong than right it, Kira Dunn said. “That is not justice; that is hypocrisy,” he wrote. “I guess the real question is, what is justice here in Missouri?""
Th entire story can be read at:
https://www.kansascity.com/news/local/crime/article255115207.html
