Despite a judge’s order to release a Black man imprisoned for more than three decades on a false conviction, Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey has ordered the prison to keep him behind bars.
Although the judge threatened to hold the attorney general in contempt of court, the Missouri Supreme Court sided with Bailey late Wednesday evening, keeping Christopher Dunn behind bars despite the overwhelming evidence that he is innocent, according to KMOV.
A St. Louis Circuit Court judge had ordered Christopher Dunn, now 52, to be released by 6 p.m. CDT Wednesday and threatened the prison warden with contempt if Dunn remained imprisoned. However, Republican Attorney General Andrew Bailey has been fighting Dunn’s release.
“Christopher Dunn has been found innocent by two separate judges after both judges hearing the evidence before them,” Dunn’s attorney, Justin Bonus, told NBC News. “He remains in prison, an innocent man, with his conviction overturned. This is a travesty of justice.”
“The AG should not be fighting Judge Sengheiser’s decision. Their job is not to fight to uphold convictions, but to seek justice. That is not what is happening here,” Bonus added.
According to The Associated Press, a top prison official told reporters that Dunn was outside the prison waiting for his wife to pick him up. But minutes later, the official retracted and said the Missouri Supreme Court issued a ruling against his release while Dunn was signing paperwork to be free.
“If you know a little about the story, you know we’ve had a lot of disappointments where we thought we’d finally get his freedom and it was snatched away,” Christopher’s wife, Kira Dunn said to the AP. “So we were just bracing ourselves.”
St. Louise Judge Jason Sengheiser — who had ordered Dunn’s release — now has until 5 p.m. Friday to respond to the state supreme court’s decision.
Dunn, 52, was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole in 1990 at the age of 19 for the shooting death of Ricco Rogers, who was 14 years old, according to KMOX.
His conviction was based solely on the testimony of two youths, ages 15 and 12, who have since recanted their statements, claiming they were pressured by police and prosecutors to implicate Dunn in the shooting death.
Family members, including his mother and sister, who have always said he was with them at the time of the murder, were not allowed to testify.
But even after it became clear to a judge in 2020 that Dunn was innocent, a 2016 ruling by the Missouri Supreme Court stated that only death row inmates could make a “freestanding” claim of actual innocence, meaning that Dunn would have to spend the rest of his life behind bars despite being innocent.
But a new state law enacted in 2021 gave prosecutors the authority to seek a hearing if they have new evidence the convicted person might have been wrongfully convicted, according to The Associated Press.
Since then, St. Louis Circuit Attorney Gabe Gore, who serves as the city’s prosecutor, as well as his predecessor, Kim Gardner, have filed motions seeking Dunn’s release from prison.
Gore’s motion filed in February states that he has “concluded that there is clear and convincing evidence of Christopher Dunn’s actual innocence that undermines the confidence in the judgment against him.”
On July 22, after a two-day hearing, Judge Sengheiser agreed with Gore, stating in his ruling that “the State of Missouri shall immediately discharge Christopher Dunn from its custody.”
But Bailey, a Republican appointed by the governor in 2023, appealed the judge’s decision, ordering the prison to keep Dunn incarcerated until a final decision is made.
It was the second time in two weeks that Bailey had ignored a court order seeking the release of an inmate whose conviction had been overturned. However, the Missouri Supreme Court ruled against him in the first case.
Bailey’s First Attempt
Bailey failed at his first attempt to keep an innocent inmate locked up when a Missouri judge threatened to hold him in contempt of court in the case of Sandra Hemme, 64, who had spent 43 years in prison for a murder she did not commit, as the Kansas City Star reported.
Turns out, it was likely a St. Joseph, Missouri, police officer named Michael Holman who committed the murder of Patricia Jeschke, 31, in 1980, as he had tried to use her credit card to buy photography gear a day after her murder.
But St. Joseph police at the time chose to ignore that piece of evidence to focus on Hemme, who was a patient at a mental hospital and was also heavily sedated when she confessed to the crime while being interrogated by cops in the hospital.
Last month, Missouri Judge Ryan Horsman ordered her released, writing in his ruling that “no evidence whatsoever outside of Ms. Hemme’s unreliable statements connects her to the crime.”
“In contrast, this Court finds that the evidence directly ties Holman to this crime and murder scene,” he elaborated, according to Fox News.
Holman, who was 22 years old at the time of the murder, was later convicted and imprisoned for insurance fraud and a string of burglaries before he died in 2015, according to the Kansas City Star.
But Bailey appealed the judge’s ruling and ordered the prison to keep her incarcerated. He even took his case to the Missouri Supreme Court, who also ordered the inmate’s release but the prison kept her incarcerated on the orders of the attorney general.
It was only after Horsman threatened Bailey with contempt of court that Hemme was released from prison.
“I would suggest you never do that,” Horsman said about Bailey’s refusal to abide by a court order, The Associated Press reported.
“To call someone and tell them to disregard a court order is wrong.”
Bailey’s Second Attempt
But Bailey is once again ignoring Judge Horsman’s advice because he is doing the same thing in the case of Dunn, who actually had alibi witnesses confirming his innocence that were not allowed to testify in court back in 1990.
“Christopher Dunn was at his mother’s house hanging out and talking on the phone,” said attorney Booker Shaw during opening statements in a recent hearing, a retired judge who joined the legal team in getting him released.
“His mother and sister will testify that he was there with them, talking on the phone while the family was watching one of their favorite TV programs,” he said, according to Fox 2.
But the Missouri Supreme Court sided with Bailey this time around, apparently buying the attorney general’s argument that he was not given enough time to prepare an appeal, claiming his office was given less than an hour to respond to three motions totaling 15 pages.
“We are devastated and so confused as to why the Missouri Supreme entertained the Attorney General’s improper intrusion into a matter already settled by a judge. Chris was literally a few steps away from freedom when the call came,” Kira Dunn, said in a statement to KSDK of St. Louis. “This is unimaginably cruel treatment of a proven innocent person. It is torture. It is pointless. It is a perversion of what justice should be in Missouri.”
