Missouri once again is providing a perfect illustration of the insanity and cruelty of Republican priorities across the entire United States.
In 1991, Christopher Dunn was falsely prosecuted and convicted of a murder that took place in St. Louis in 1990 and sentenced to life plus 90 years. Years later, the teens whose testimony helped convict him recanted their testimony and a judge reviewed the case in 2020 and ruled there was "significant evidence of his innocence." In 2023, the current St. Louis City Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner filed a motion for Dunn's release but left office days later in scandal. Her replacement created a special "conviction integrity unit" to review a collection of cases including that of Dunn and later concluded Dunn should be released as well. The Dunn case was presented to a judge in May of 2024 and on July 22, 2024, the judge issued a 37-page decision granting the motion to vacate the original conviction and release Dunn.
Yet, Missouri State Attorney General Andrew Bailey, a Republican appointed to the position in late 2022 after then Attorney General Eric Schmitt won election to the US Senate, is fighting the order through the Missouri State Supreme Court, which bizarrely issued a stay on the order to release Dunn pending some review it would provide to Bailey's motions to stop the release.
The word bizarre applies here for many reasons.
- the wrongful conviction is not the fault of any current actor in this drama
- a court has not only found original testimony failed to provide proof beyond a reasonable doubt of GUILT, a court has ruled there is ample proof of actual INNOCENCE
- yet the Attorney General and staff are arguing they are working to uphold the decision of the original jury who reached a guilty verdict "fair and square" with the information they had
- and the Attorney General seems to be arguing that Missouri law only allows vacating of a verdict and release if the defendant faces the death penalty -- short of the death penalty, you can rot in jail
- yet a state law passed in 2021 to address these situations gives the State Attorney General no role in this appeals process -- he isn't a party to the process and has no right to appeal it, yet the Missouri Supreme Court is acting as though he does
It's actually no surprise at all that this legal circus would occur in Missouri, and certainly not a surprise with Andrew Bailey as Attorney General. This is the same Attorney General who just filed a brief with the US Supreme Court arguing they should overturn Donald Trump's STATE criminal convictions for fraud in New York because those STATE convictions in New York are somehow depriving Missouri citizens of their rights...
Andrew Bailey scored his undergrad degree and his JD from the University of Missouri ("Mizzou"). I'm not familiar with the exact curriculum at Mizzou's law school but would hope it covered the concepts of equal protection and equal sovereignty between the states. The concept of equal protection holds that no state can arbitrarily curtail a freedom or immunity granted to a US citizen and must equally enforce laws across all citizens. The concept of equal sovereignty holds that no state can arbitrarily undermine another state's ability to enforce its laws within its territory. If State A wants to enforce a maximum speed limit of 50 mph on A's state roads and State B wants to allow a 65mph limit on B's state roads, State B does NOT have the power to block A from enforcing its lower limit on roads within State A nor does State A have the authority to send its police into State B and enforce A's lower limit on State B roads, even on State A drivers.
Yet Andrew Bailey is spending Missouri tax dollars to interfere all the way up to the Supreme Court to block the attempt of another sovereign state to enforce its criminal statutes against a one-time resident of its state. And Bailey's sole motivation for doing so is to curry favor with Donald Trump for Bailey's own political career and shore up support among Republicans while trying to win a primary to retain his current job.
Stop and ponder the crassness and hypocrisy of this situation. An attorney general simultaneously tampering with another state's conviction of another state's citizen while IGNORING court orders to RELEASE a man that has already spent thirty three years in jail for a crime a COURT has ruled he DID NOT COMMIT. Under any normal circumstance in any normal state, Andrew Bailey's actions would be deserving of impeachment and removal from office, for actual legal incompetence and corruption. Yet, this is just another day in modern Republican civics.
WTH
