Four years after a court ruled he was likely innocent, Christopher Dunn is getting a chance to be freed.
St. Louis Circuit Judge Jason Sengheiser began taking testimony Tuesday in a hearing on a motion to vacate Dunn’s conviction in the May 1990 murder of Ricco Rogers. Dunn is serving a life sentence, but two adolescent eyewitnesses have recanted, and prosecutors now say they no longer believe Dunn is guilty.
“The fact of the matter is, no one saw the shooter of Ricco Rogers,” Special Assistant Circuit Attorney Booker Shaw told the court in his opening statement. “The only witnesses who implicate Christopher Dunn are proven liars unworthy of belief.”
Circuit Attorney Gabe Gore’s office is arguing the motion along with attorneys from the Midwest Innocence Project. They spent Tuesday working to lay the basis for why Sengheiser should believe the recantations, rather than the eyewitnesses' original statements.
Lawyers with the attorney general’s office, which has the authority to defend convictions, called the evidence in Dunn’s favor nothing more than a “good story.”
“I anticipate this court will see the evolution of Christopher Dunn's story and how over time he or people working for him, whether inside or outside of prison, have cultivated the current version of Dunn’s lies,” Associate Attorney General Tristin Estep said in her opening statement.
Eugene Wilson, who said he was friends with Dunn and Rogers, told the court that he had gone with another friend to get Chinese food the night of the shooting. He said they had just gotten back to the house where Rogers and the two boys were on the stoop when the shooting began.
“What do you remember seeing about the shooter?” Rachael Moore, an attorney for Dunn, asked Wilson.
“It was real dark. The only thing I saw was the fire coming from the gun,” Wilson replied.
Wilson said he doubted Dunn would have been the shooter because Dunn and Rogers were friends. He said that a few days before the shooting, he and Rogers, along with a few others, had jumped Rogers’ mother’s boyfriend after the boyfriend had assaulted her.
Wilson admitted that he did not talk to police that night because he had had negative experiences with law enforcement. And he acknowledged inconsistencies in a sworn statement in which he said he was sitting on the porch eating rice at the time of the shooting, rather than walking back from the Chinese restaurant.
To back up Wilson’s assertion that it would have been too dark for the eyewitnesses to see well enough to make a positive identification, Dunn’s team had Scott Roder, a crime scene reconstruction expert, present an animation of the shooting based on the evidence gathered for previous attempts to free Dunn from prison.
But Roder said under cross-examination that his animation did not include certain parts of statements from one eyewitness, DeMorris Stepp, who had said he saw the shooter in the gangway. He also acknowledged that he did not go to the scene at 5607 Labadie to see if there were other streetlights that could have affected the ability of eyewitnesses to see. Google Maps shows a streetlight just a few houses from the location, though Eugene Wilson testified the light was blocked by a tree.
Stepp was charged with armed robbery in 1991, the year Dunn was convicted. On Tuesday, Dunn’s attorneys read part of an interview from Curtis Stewart, who knew both Dunn and Stepp from the neighborhood and was in jail at the same time as Stepp.
Stewart told the interviewer that he had overheard Stepp tell someone on the phone that “he didn’t really know who killed the guy, Ricco,” and then later, “I don’t really give a f—, no way. I’m getting a deal out of it.” Stepp would later be sentenced to probation for the armed robbery.
Stepp is currently serving his own life sentence for a 1997 slaying. He’s been ordered to be brought to St. Louis to testify in the case. The second eyewitness, Michael Davis Jr., was in prison in California when he recanted in 2017 but later absconded from a drug treatment facility.
The process for Dunn is the same one used to free Lamar Johnson and Kevin Strickland. St. Louis County Prosecutor Wesley Bell has filed a similar motion in the case of Marcellus Williams, who is on death row.
The hearing is expected to last through at least Wednesday. Sengheiser will rule at a later date.
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