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That’s what one of his assistants, Shaun Mackelprang, argued before three Missouri Court of Appeals judges on Wednesday morning in downtown St. Louis. Mackelprang was there to argue that St. Louis Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner has no legal power to seek a new trial in the murder conviction of Lamar Johnson. Gardner’s Conviction Integrity Unit, along with the Midwest Innocence Project, investigated Johnson’s case and determined he was actually innocent of the charges he was convicted of in 1995. Circuit Court Judge Elizabeth Hogan refused to hear Gardner’s motion. Gardner appealed.

“They can take no further action in that case,� Mackelprang argued. He didn’t address whether Johnson is innocent. To the attorney general’s office, that doesn’t matter. If a court were to allow a prosecutor to dismiss a case, or otherwise relitigate it post-sentencing, Mackelprang said, that would be illegal.

“In doing so,� Mackelprang said, “the court acts outside of the law.�

If that’s the case, the attorney general might want to have a talk with St. Charles County Prosecuting Attorney Tim Lohmar.

Last year, to free two innocent men, Lohmar, who is the president of the , did precisely that which the attorney general’s office said is illegal. The case started in May 2015. That’s when a 17-year-old woman told police in St. Charles County that two teens, 16 and 17 years old, raped her. The teens said the sex was consensual. ÁñÁ«ÊÓƵ were arrested and jailed and charged with rape. Eventually, they pleaded guilty in a plea bargain that let them out of jail mostly for time served. They served more than a year behind bars.

Then, in 2018, the woman told a North Carolina detective a remarkably similar story about two other men. Suspicious, he contacted St. Charles County. The original detective in the case flew to North Carolina and reinterviewed the alleged victim. The detective determined she had lied in the original case.

So Lohmar went to court, filed a motion to set aside the convictions, and cited a Missouri Supreme Court rule that allowed prosecutors wide discretion to do so in cases of “manifest injustice.�

Because the two men have had their convictions vacated, I won’t name them here. I first came across their cases on the , which lists 2,522 people who have been freed across the nation, post conviction, after having been found innocent of the charges that originally sent them to jail.

Many of those cases were brought by prosecutors who, like Gardner, have Conviction Integrity Units.

That’s really what Johnson’s case is about.

In many ways, it is like so many others: a case involving a black man in which there is credible evidence of dishonest dealing by detectives and prosecutors from the original case. Most fascinating about the arguments before appeals court judges Robert Clayton III, Roy Richter and Robert Dowd Jr. was that the attorney general’s office completely ignored the evidence in the Conviction Integrity Unit’s report.

That’s “a very dim view� of justice, argued Washington University law professor Daniel Harawa, who represented Gardner before the court of appeals. “She must be able to go to the courts and right that wrong,� Harawa said of Gardner. The court “has inherent authority to prevent a manifest injustice.�

There are those words again: manifest injustice.

Attorney Charlie Weiss was in court at the Old Post Office building Wednesday morning to hear them. Weiss, an attorney with Bryan Cave Leighton Paisner, is a veteran of actual innocence cases, having worked to exonerate several wrongly convicted men. He said the motion Lohmar filed last year followed a similar process to Johnson’s case.

“The principle should be the same,� Weiss said. “Kim Gardner is trying to correct a manifest injustice. We strongly believe that it is imperative to the pursuit of justice that there be a mechanism for a prosecutor to fulfill his or her ethical duty within her geographic jurisdiction, and that is to see that justice is done. A local prosecutor, like Gardner, should always have the right to apply to a court to correct a manifest injustice in order to pursue her fundamental duty to pursue justice.�

Weiss helped file a brief in Johnson’s appeal signed by 34 prosecutors from around the country who agree that their job isn’t just to put people away, but also to work to set them free when mistakes are made.

Three Missouri Court of Appeals judges will now decide who is right.

If they rule against Johnson, and if Schmitt agrees with what his assistant said, then two innocent men in St. Charles County better lawyer up.

The attorney general is coming for you.