ST. LOUIS — In third grade, Christopher Dunn took a field trip to the downtown.
There was not yet a statue of Dred and Harriet Scott there. But Dunn, then a student at Gundlach Elementary School, would learn the story of the most infamous legal decision in U.S. history. The Scotts, both born into slavery, seeking their freedom on April 6, 1846. They had lived for a while in Illinois, a free state, and Missouri had court precedent that honored the laws of free states and territories. A ºüÀêÊÓƵ Circuit Court judge ruled in the Scotts’ favor, but the Missouri Supreme Court overturned the decision.
“Times now are not as they once were,†the court ruled, from the building known now as the Old Courthouse.
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Dunn mentioned Dred Scott the first time we talked, in 2021, when he was in the Jefferson City Correctional Center. The previous year, after a hearing in which he presented new evidence in his 1991 murder conviction, a circuit judge ruled that Dunn was innocent. But he couldn’t set Dunn free because the Missouri Supreme Court had decided that the standard for innocence could only be applied in cases where a defendant faced the death penalty.
So there Dunn was, innocent but in prison, wondering if, like Scott, he’d spend nearly the rest of his life without the freedom he deserved.
On Wednesday afternoon, we stood on the east side of that Old Courthouse, separated from the statue of the Scotts by a fence as the building undergoes repairs. Dunn is now a free man, having finally been unlocked from captivity by ºüÀêÊÓƵ Circuit Court Judge Jason Sengheiser after a new hearing and a little more meandering by the Missouri Supreme Court.
Times now are not as they once were.
The elementary school of Dunn’s youth, in the Wells-Goodfellow neighborhood on the city’s north side, has been closed since 2009. It sits abandoned, listed for sale on the ºüÀêÊÓƵ Public Schools site for $347,895.
A free man for less than 24 hours on Wednesday, Dunn had followed events in ºüÀêÊÓƵ from afar for most of the 34 years he spent in prison. He calls this the “city that I love,†the city of his youth.
But it’s also a city that still has high crime rates, dwindling population and once-thriving neighborhoods that are now hollowed out.
“The city of ºüÀêÊÓƵ has fallen,†Dunn said matter-of-factly.
He ties that decline in part to the rush to jail young Black men like him in the late 1980s and early 1990s. It was the “tough on crime†era, and the city was packing its jails, and state was packing its prisons, at unprecedented rates. The city’s first Black U.S. District judge, Clyde S. Cahill, recognized the potential for that strategy to backfire in an opinion issued in 1990 — the year Dunn was arrested for a murder he didn’t commit.
“Mass detention for petty offenses now may give temporary relief but it only postpones the misery to come,†Cahill wrote then.
They were prescient words, foreshadowing the exonerations in the next century of some of those men — like Lamar Johnson, who walked free last year, and Dunn, whose freedom was delayed by a system that sometimes values process more than truth.
When he walked out of the Carnahan Courthouse on Tuesday afternoon, Dunn asked reporters to remember people like him in prison — innocent people fighting for their freedom — as well as those who will come home someday to ºüÀêÊÓƵ or elsewhere, trying to pick up their lives amid the barriers set in their way.
“Let their stories be heard,†Dunn urged. “Give them a chance.â€
Many of those folks — some innocent, some sent away on long and unjust sentences — are from that 1990s era, says Kenya Brumfield-Young. She’s an and criminal justice at ºüÀêÊÓƵ University who has been working with Dunn and other prisoners to research their cases.
“We don’t know exactly how many are there, but when you look at the past six years and we’ve had at least five exonerations, that’s not an anomaly,†Brumfield-Young says.
Some of the prisoners, like Dunn, were just teenagers when they were sent away. “There was nobody to believe them when they said, ‘I didn’t do this,’†she says.
On Wednesday, Dunn turned to the Gateway Arch and gazed on the monument that defines ºüÀêÊÓƵ.
“Look at that Arch,†he says. “It’s beautiful.â€
But it was built on ground along the Mississippi River where slaves were once bought and sold. The land under it was taken from Black business owners, and it leads to the courthouse where Dred and Harriet Scott lost their freedom and where Dunn celebrated his.
He’s looking forward now, with optimism. But the life that was stolen from him is a testament to an ignominious history in Missouri, with stories still being written.
“You can walk up from the steps of that beautiful monument to right here,†Dunn said. “It’s not the Gateway to the West. It’s the stopping point of evolution.â€
In beautiful, complicated ºüÀêÊÓƵ, progress is measured in generations. Unlike the former slave he learned about in third grade, Dunn walked out of a ºüÀêÊÓƵ courthouse a free man this week. After we spoke at the Old Courthouse, he walked hand-in-hand with his wife, Kira, from one courthouse to the other, taking in the simple pleasures of his new life.
Times now are not as they once were.