ST. LOUIS — St. Louis Circuit Attorney Gabe Gore has appointed former federal judge and assistant circuit attorney Booker Shaw to review the first-degree murder conviction of Christopher Dunn dating back to 1990.
Shaw has agreed to do so on a pro-bono basis.
It's somewhat of an about-face for Shaw, who represented the judges of the 22nd Judicial Circuit as they prepared to testify against Gore’s predecessor Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner during the Missouri Attorney General’s lawsuit to remove Gardner from office.
She resigned before that case went to trial.
Petitioning the court to review Dunn’s conviction was one of Kim Gardner’s last acts in office. She filed the request after witnesses who testified against Dunn later said authorities had pressured them to lie. In her request, Gardner cited “clear and convincing evidence” that he had not been involved in the 1990 shooting death of Ricco Rogers.
“In a case of this magnitude, a full review of the facts and the law is required," Gore said in a release announcing Shaw's appointment. "I could not think of a better attorney to assist me in conducting the necessary analysis. I would like to thank Thompson Coburn for lending us one of their finest legal minds."
Dunn, 51, who is Black, was 18 when Ricco Rogers was killed. Among the key evidence used to convict him was testimony from two boys who were at the scene of the shooting. Both later recanted their testimony, saying they had been coerced by police and prosecutors.
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 declined to exonerate Dunn, citing a 2016 Missouri Supreme Court ruling that only death row inmates — not those like Dunn sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole — could make a “freestanding” claim of actual innocence.
A 2021 law now allows prosecutors to seek court hearings in cases with new evidence of a wrongful conviction. It has led to the freeing of another longtime inmate, Kevin Strickland, who served more than 40 years for a Kansas City triple killing. Lamar Johnson, who spent nearly three decades in prison, was the second inmate freed as a result of the new law.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
