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ST. LOUIS — Christopher Dunn is a unicorn.

Thirty-two years ago, he was convicted of murdering Ricco Rogers in the Wells-Goodfellow neighborhood. Dunn was 18 at the time. He said he didn’t do it. He still says he didn’t do it.

Two years ago, after he had already served three decades in prison, a judge agreed with him.

“This Court does not believe that any jury would now convict Christopher Dunn under these facts,� wrote Texas County Circuit Judge William E. Hickle after a hearing.

The eyewitnesses had recanted their testimony. Dunn’s alibi evidence was presented. The evidence of “actual innocence� was clear, Hickle determined.

Still, Dunn stayed in prison, an innocent man whom the system would not set free — a judicial oddity that stands out in the worst way. Why? Because of a Missouri court precedent from 2016 that said only prisoners on death row who proved their innocence in hearings before a judge could have their sentences vacated. Because Dunn was in prison on a life sentence, Hickle could not release him.

When I first wrote about Dunn in 2021, he had no avenue for freedom. At the time, the Missouri Supreme Court had blocked an attempt by the St. Louis Circuit Attorney’s Office to free Lamar Johnson, another wrongfully convicted man. Johnson finally got his day in court when the Legislature passed a law allowing prosecutors to try to vacate convictions in cases where they believe justice hasn’t been served.

Last December, as attorneys appointed by Circuit Attorney Kimberly M. Gardner argued in a St. Louis courtroom for Johnson’s freedom, Dunn’s wife, Kira, was there. She was more than an interested observer. She was Dunn’s eyes and ears, watching the process that now might lead to Dunn’s freedom.

On Monday, Gardner’s office filed a motion to vacate Dunn’s conviction, seeking to follow the process used in Johnson’s case to free another innocent man.

“After decades of legal filings, research and investigation, celebrations and last farewells missed, hopes raised and then dashed, we have a feeling of real hope that justice will finally be done,� Kira told me in an email this week.

It’s just the latest curveball in a justice system that sometimes struggles to make sense, especially as Gardner resigns amid an attempt to force her out of office. Gardner officially left her office the day after she filed the motion in Dunn’s case.

Hickle’s ruling relied on an appeals court decision in the case of Rodney Lincoln, who was wrongfully convicted but was not released even after a finding of innocence. It took a gubernatorial pardon for Lincoln to taste freedom. Attorneys have tried for years to get the Missouri Supreme Court to overturn that ruling. They have failed.

“This is the only way that somebody who is innocent and not sentenced to death can have their case heard,� says attorney Tricia Rojo Bushnell of the Midwest Innocence Project, which is representing Dunn. “Missouri is the only state in the nation that has this distinction.�

It’s a depressing distinction, especially if you’re stuck living at the South Central Correctional Center with a document that says you should be a free man. What does it say about the state of the justice system when a judge bound by a bad precedent has to keep a man in prison despite a finding of innocence?

It’s why Dunn, the first time we talked, compared himself to Dred Scott, the former Missouri slave who found freedom only to have the courts snatch it away in one of the most infamous rulings in our country’s history.

“To hear him say I was innocent, but yet he can’t free me because I’m not a death row inmate, I didn’t understand,� Dunn told me in 2021.

Now, with renewed hope, Dunn is poised to state his case for freedom again. He’ll do so in front of a second judge, who will now have a state law allowing him to unlock the jailhouse cell that keeps an innocent man behind bars.