Messenger: Missouri Republicans hop on the criminal justice reform bandwagon. Welcome. (2024)

ST. LOUIS — Gilbert Poole and Christopher Dunn have a lot in common.

Both men have served more than three decades in prison for murder. Both men have long maintained their innocence.

Poole was released from prison in May 2021 after a judge in Michigan vacated his sentence. He was the first person to be exonerated through the Michigan Attorney General’s Conviction Integrity Unit. Key to his freedom was a DNA test that showed he couldn’t have committed the murder for which he was charged.

Poole was in St. Louis last month, along with a fellow Michigan exoneree, Ronnell Johnson. They watched Dunn go through a hearing similar to the ones they had, trying to convince a judge to set him free. Dunn, convicted of killing Ricco Rogers in 1990, was already found innocent by one judge. But a quirk in Missouri law made him go through the process again, this time after St. Louis Circuit Attorney Gabe Gore pursued the cause after an investigation by his Conviction Integrity Unit.

Those types of units, established by prosecutors and attorneys general in several states, have helped exonerate dozens of wrongfully convicted men and women in the past few years. They have been most popular with so-called “progressive” prosecutors, who have formed the units to right past wrongs in the criminal justice system.

In Missouri, for example, Jackson County Prosecutor Jean Peters Baker’s Conviction Integrity Unit investigated the case of Kevin Strickland, who was released from prison in 2021 after a successful innocence hearing. The same is true for Lamar Johnson, freed last year after a hearing sought by Gore’s predecessor, Kim Gardner.

Poole, like most defendants who seek their freedom over failures in the justice system, wrote his first legal brief himself. He had the help of a “jailhouse lawyer” — an inmate who spends a lot of time in the prison law library researching the law and helping fellow defendants.

“So often people are caught in a procedural morass that keeps them locked up,” Poole told me after Dunn’s hearing last month. “Our legal system has so many barriers to create finality in a case.”

One of those barriers in Missouri has been the attorney general’s office. Every recent Missouri attorney general — from Democrat Jay Nixon to the last three Republicans in the office (Josh Hawley, Eric Schmitt, Andrew Bailey) — fought the innocence cases of Dunn, Johnson and Strickland, as well as prior cases.

It’s interesting, then, to see the reaction of all three recent Republican attorneys general to the conviction of former President Trump on 34 felony charges over fraudulent business records in the state of New York.

That conviction, handed down by a jury of 12 New Yorkers, came one week after Dunn’s hearing concluded. In Dunn’s case, Bailey defended the jury system and the conviction despite witnesses who said they lied and a prior hearing in which a judge found Dunn innocent.

A week later, Bailey, like nearly every elected Republican in the country, was pouring gasoline on the judicial system. He called Trump’s conviction an “illicit, witch-hunt prosecution” and “an illegal conviction.”

Schmitt called Trump’s case a “Soviet-style show trial” and a “miscarriage of justice.” Hawley called the conviction a “mockery” of the criminal justice system.

All three men are lawyers who should know better than to use such incendiary language to trash the American court system. Yes, the system sometimes gets things wrong. It happens for a variety of reasons, often when prosecutors cut corners and judges don’t properly defend the rights of defendants.

But there’s an appeals process that gives defendants an opportunity to prove their innocence. In Missouri and elsewhere, smart prosecutors and lawmakers have created conviction integrity units to help undo some of the past wrongs.

Since 1989, the National Registry of Exonerations has tracked more than 3,500 men and women who have been cleared of wrongful convictions. Many of them spent decades behind bars before earning their freedom.

The good news for Trump is he was convicted in a jurisdiction with a prosecutor who believes in being a minister of justice. In 2022, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin L. Bragg, Jr., launched his own Post-Conviction Justice Unit, should Trump want to apply to have his case investigated after his appeals are exhausted.

In the meantime, if Bailey and his fellow criminal justice reform converts want to help with that cause, rather than waste their time casting empty aspersions on a faraway court, there are plenty of cases in Missouri that could use their attention. Dunn’s attorneys at the Midwest Innocence Project would be glad to help point them in the right direction.