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ST. LOUIS — Christopher Dunn is getting his day in court.

Again.

This time, the Missouri Supreme Court won’t stand in the way of his freedom.

On Wednesday, St. Louis Circuit Attorney Gabe Gore filed a motion to vacate the 1991 murder conviction that sent Dunn to prison. Gore, after an investigation headed by former Judge Booker Shaw, came to the same conclusion that his predecessor, Kim Gardner, did: Dunn is innocent and justice requires that he be set free.

Under a law passed by the Missouri Legislature in 2021, and spurred by Gardner’s efforts to free the wrongly convicted Lamar Johnson, Gore can seek a hearing before a new judge to prove that Dunn should be exonerated.

But it won’t be the first time a judge came to the conclusion that Dunn, convicted in the shooting death of a 15-year-old boy, is “actually innocent.� The judge’s decision came in 2020. Dunn was represented by Kansas City attorney Kent Gipson then. At a hearing, Judge William H. Hickle determined that, based on recanted testimony and alibi witnesses, there was no way a jury would convict Dunn.

Hickle, though, couldn’t set Dunn free. That’s because of a Missouri Supreme Court ruling that says innocence isn’t enough to free a man unless he is on death row.

Dunn is not on death row. So for the past four years, he has stayed in prison as Gipson, attorneys with the and successive prosecutors in St. Louis sought his freedom.

“I feel like Dred Scott,� Dunn told me in 2021, referencing the infamous U.S. Supreme Court ruling that Scott, a former slave living in St. Louis, wasn’t entitled to freedom because he wasn’t considered a citizen.

The Old Courthouse where Scott fought for his freedom is just down Market Street from where Dunn, at a hearing to come later, will fight for his.

It’s an ongoing tragedy that highlights a reality of our criminal justice system: police and prosecutors sometimes rush to judgment, particularly when race is involved.

But even when new evidence comes to light, the system fights like hell to defend its errors.

But there is progress in St. Louis and elsewhere, as prosecutors increasingly act in their roles as “ministers of justice� to right past wrongs. Gore’s announcement came a week after St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney Wesley Bell filed a similar motion in the case of Marcellus Williams, who was convicted in 1998 of murdering social worker and former Post-Dispatch reporter Lisha Gayle.

The 1990s were a precarious time in the St. Louis region, with a murder rate that had spiked and police under tremendous pressure to clear cases. Sometimes police took shortcuts. If not for defendants getting the attention of attorneys like Tricia Rojo Bushnell at the Midwest Innocence Project, they would continue to waste away behind bars — innocent men whose freedom had been wrongly taken from them.

“Missouri is the only state in the nation to limit innocence claims by a person’s sentence,� Bushnell said in a statement after Gore’s announcement on the Dunn case. “And until the legislature changes the law, only a prosecutor can petition a court to free an innocent person sentenced to anything less than death.�

Gore’s conviction integrity unit, headed by former Missouri Supreme Court Judge George W. Draper III, is reviewing 38 other cases.

Dunn’s innocence hearing will bring his wife, Kira, back to a familiar place. In December 2022, when Johnson fought for his freedom in a similar hearing, Kira was there nearly every step of the way. She hoped that the next time she visited the Carnahan Courthouse in St. Louis, it would be to see her husband walk out a free man.

On Wednesday, one step closer to that day, she cried “happy tears,� she told me.

Now it’s back to a courtroom. This time, innocence will be enough.