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Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey sure loves keeping innocent people behind bars. He fought and fought and fought to keep Sandra Hemme in prison despite the fact that her conviction made absolutely no sense and could never have made any sense to anyone who thought about it seriously for more than 10 minutes. She’s out now!
He also fought and fought and fought to keep Christopher Dunn in prison for a crime he didn’t commit. Dunn, however, walked free this week after having been incarcerated for 34 years for the 1990 murder of 15-year-old Ricco Rogers.
Earlier this month, St. Louis Circuit Court Judge Jason Sengheiser, persuaded by the testimonies of two witnesses who said police had coerced them into identifying Dunn as the killer, ruled that Dunn had been wrongly convicted and demanded he be released within two days.
Bailey had argued in court, based on absolutely nothing, that the two witnesses were coerced this time, rather than 34 years ago. Judge Sengheiser didn’t buy it, and ultimately determined that St. Louis Circuit Attorney Gabe Gore had successfully proven Dunn’s “actual innocence.” In his decision, he wrote that “[t]he Attorney General provided zero evidence to support these allegations.”
But as with Sandra Hemme, Andrew Bailey was not ready to give up! Christopher Dunn was all ready to go, threw out his prison toothbrush, gave away everything he owned while in there, and was all dressed and just steps away from freedom when the warden got a call saying that Dunn had to stay. Because Andrew Bailey had successfully petitioned the Missouri state supreme court to keep him locked up.
On Tuesday, the high court decided to lift the stay and Dunn was freed.
But that’s not all! Bailey has also fought tooth and nail to keep death row inmate Marcellus Williams from even having a hearing to put forth his case that he was wrongly convicted — but while the Missouri supreme court will not put a stay on his execution, scheduled for September, they will allow the hearing to happen whether Bailey likes it or not.
Williams is represented by the Midwest Innocence Project, but is also supported by St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney Wesley Bell, who believes that the conviction against Williams was wrongly obtained.
Williams was convicted of the 1998 murder of St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter Felicia Anne Gayle Picus, based on the testimony of a jailhouse informant and his ex-girlfriend.
Via The Intercept:
There were ample reasons to distrust the informants’ accounts, including that both were facing prison time for unrelated crimes, and each had a history of ratting on others to save themselves. Many of the details they offered shifted across questioning and others simply did not match the murder. Nonetheless, Williams was tried and convicted in 2001 based primarily on their waffling and contradictory tales.
Williams has maintained his innocence and has twice come close to execution. His lawyers requested DNA testing of crime scene evidence prior to his trial, but the court denied it. It wasn’t until the eve of Williams’s execution in 2015 that the state Supreme Court issued a stay and ordered testing of the murder weapon, which ultimately revealed unknown male DNA and excluded Williams as a donor.
What. The. Actual. Fuck?
So there’s no physical evidence, no motive, and the only “witnesses” are people who had something to gain and didn’t even have their stories straight.
You know, part of the reason, I’m sure, that people like Andrew Bailey fight so damn hard to keep obviously innocent (or at least obviously not guilty) people in prison is because they think if people keep getting out of prison because they were wrongly convicted, people will lose faith in the justice system’s ability to keep them safe. Because let’s be real here — Marcellus Williams’s wrongful conviction means that the guy who really brutally murdered Picus was able to go free. That is not very comforting!
I’m sure he also worries that the more people hear about these things, the harder it will be to convince juries to convict based on such insufficient evidence — which would make his job a hell of a lot harder.
That being said, it should be very clear to anyone with half a brain that this case is some bullshit. He doesn’t need to be freed in order for people to see that — so perhaps it’s better for people to be able to at least pretend to believe that if the system gets things wrong, it is possible for it to be corrected.
I hope that Andrew Bailey is unhappy. I do. I hope that he spends his whole weekend moping about the fact that innocent people are going free or getting their day in court whether he likes it or not. I also hope that he can get some therapy and perhaps get to the root of why he loves to keep innocent people in prison so much, because honestly it’s pretty freaking weird.
