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ST. LOUIS — Christopher Dunn stared at his 18-year-old self from afar.

It was about 11:15 a.m. on Wednesday in the third-floor courtroom of St. Louis Circuit Court Judge Jason Sengheiser. Dunn was sitting in silence as the prosecutor’s office that put him away for murder 33 years ago now tried to set him free in a two-day hearing to prove his innocence.

The detective who investigated his case, Gary Stittum, retired from the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department, was on the stand. Stittum was talking about the photo lineup in which two boys picked Dunn as the killer of 15-year-old Ricco Rogers on May 18, 1990.

Dunn’s mugshot at age 18 flashed on a television screen. Dunn, in a gray suit and tie, turned to the screen and burned a hole in the eyes of the boy he used to be. He scratched the top of his bald head as he looked at the kid from the Wells-Goodfellow neighborhood with a full head of hair. He rubbed his chin and adjusted his glasses as he maintained his purposeful gaze.

He was so young. They all were. Pig and Nugey, Gino and Trap. They called each other by nicknames because that’s what kids do. They scraped together change to walk to The Chinaman for cheap egg foo young and rice. They sometimes wore the colors of the gangs — red for Bloods, blue for Crips — that had invaded St. Louis from California and Chicago, recruiting young soldiers for the drug trade that hollowed out cities while filling prisons. But mostly they were pretenders — “perpetrators,� Stittum called them — donning colors that could get them killed even if they weren’t truly living the gang life.

The 1990s were a precarious time in St. Louis, with high crime and record homicides — but also a rush to judgment in the criminal justice system that sent away young Black men on scant evidence, jailhouse snitches, bare-bones investigations and questionable eyewitness testimony.

That’s what this two-day hearing was about. Not so much to rehash everything that happened 34 years ago on a Labadie Avenue porch near midnight, but mostly to answer one question: Were those two boys — 12 and 14 at the time — reliable enough witnesses to put a man in prison for the rest of his life? As adults, both have recanted their testimony.

“This is not a re-trial of the original case,� Circuit Attorney Gabe Gore said in his closing argument. “It’s undisputed that the only evidence supporting Mr. Dunn’s conviction was the testimony of 14-year-old DeMorris Stepp and 12-year-old Michael Davis. They have since recanted their testimony. … There is no evidence that remains.�

The former prosecutor in the case, Steven Ohmer, retired as a circuit court judge just last month. He acknowledged under questioning from the Missouri Attorney General’s office — which is fighting the attempt to free Dunn — that the witness testimony was key to the case.

“Ultimately, witnesses are what will make or break a case,� Ohmer said.

Consider this case broken.

The fact that Gore was there is part of a circular tale, showing how facts can sometimes get swallowed in the morass of the criminal justice system.

Dunn was already found innocent in 2020 by a judge in Texas County. Hearing much of the same evidence that made up this week’s proceedings, Judge William Hickle ruled that Dunn met the standard for “actual innocence� that the Missouri Supreme Court spelled out in the exoneration of Joseph Amrine in 2003. That standard, providing “clear and convincing evidence of actual innocence that undermines confidence� in the conviction, would apply to any potential reversals of death penalty cases, the court decided.

But Dunn didn’t face the death penalty. His sentence was life in prison without parole. So even when finding him “actually innocent� four years ago, Hickle said his hands were tied and he couldn’t set Dunn free.

Around the same time, former Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner was trying to free another innocent St. Louisan, Lamar Johnson, who also had been wrongly convicted of murder in the 1990s. The Missouri Supreme Court said there was no legal mechanism allowing her to do that, so the Missouri Legislature passed a law that allows prosecutors to right past wrongs.

The new law, similar to those in several other states, has since been used to free Johnson, Kevin Strickland in Kansas City and now possibly Dunn. The case to vacate Dunn’s conviction was filed by Gardner before she resigned. Gore, after he was appointed, re-investigated and then filed his own motion to vacate, appointing former Judge Booker Shaw as a special assistant in the case.

In both his opening and closing arguments during this week’s hearing, Shaw leaned heavily into as the guiding star in this case, in part because it was a conviction based on witnesses who were found later to be liars.

“No credible evidence remains to support this conviction,� Shaw said during the hearing. “That fact alone ends the discussion.�

The case is now in the hands of Sengheiser, who is expected to make a ruling in coming weeks.

Dunn isn’t 18 anymore. His youth was lost to a broken criminal justice system. He is now 52.

His wife, Kira, whom Dunn met while she was investigating his case for a publication, stood guard in the courtroom each day with other family members, including Dunn’s mother and sisters. They know that the man who might come home soon isn’t the boy who was locked away for 34 years for a murder the evidence suggests he didn’t commit.

“I think the body of evidence speaks for itself,� Kira told me after the hearing. “We are hopeful that the judge will see what Judge Hickle, retired Judge Shaw, and two prosecutors have found — that Christopher Dunn is innocent and he deserves his freedom.�

Editor's note: The original version of this column incorrectly stated that the daughter of Dunn's close friend, born shortly before he was arrested, was his daughter. The girl's mother has testified in previous court hearings that Dunn is not the father of the child.