Tricia Rojo Bushnell

Missouri’s New Innocence Hearing

Kevin Strickland was eighteen when Missouri imprisoned him. By the time Judge James Welsh heard the evidence proving his innocence, forty-three years had passed and the statute authorizing that hearing was less than three months old.

Three people were killed in a Kansas City home in 1978. Cynthia Douglas survived. Her first account identified two other men and placed Kevin Strickland somewhere else. After police questioning, she named Strickland; for years afterward, she tried to withdraw the identification.

The two men convicted as participants said Strickland had no role. No physical evidence connected him to the scene. A first trial ended without a verdict. A second jury convicted him in 1979, and he received concurrent sentences that included life without parole for fifty years.

Long before Missouri created a procedure allowing an elected prosecutor to bring an innocence claim to court, the evidence against Strickland had substantially weakened. By 2021, Douglas had died, the co-defendants had disclaimed Strickland’s involvement, and Jackson County Prosecutor Jean Peters Baker had concluded that he was innocent.

Section 547.031

Missouri Revised Statutes section 547.031 became effective on August 28, 2021. It authorized a prosecuting or circuit attorney who possessed information that a convicted person may be innocent or erroneously convicted to begin a new civil collateral proceeding attacking the conviction.

The statute required a hearing. It permitted the attorney general to participate. It directed the circuit court to grant relief upon clear and convincing evidence of actual innocence or constitutional error that undermined confidence in the judgment. It also required findings capable of review.

Baker filed for Strickland immediately. Tricia Rojo Bushnell and the Midwest Innocence Project represented him in the proceeding. On November 23, 2021, the court found clear and convincing evidence of actual innocence, vacated the convictions, and ended more than forty-three years of imprisonment.

The order demonstrated the practical force of the new statute: evidence developed after ordinary appellate deadlines could be presented at a hearing initiated by the prosecutor responsible for the conviction’s integrity.

Kevin Strickland and Missouri Compensation Law

Strickland left prison at sixty-two without state compensation. Missouri’s restitution statute then applied only when DNA testing established innocence. His case rested on eyewitness history, recantation, the co-defendants’ accounts, and the collapse of the prosecution’s proof. The exoneration was complete; the compensation category did not recognize it.

Private donors raised more than $1 million while he rebuilt a life last lived outside prison as a teenager. Wages, credit, housing history, medical continuity, family years, and ordinary records did not reappear with the release order.

Bushnell framed the question after his release: “So, it’s really, what do we owe him for the wrong that we did?” The words joined litigation to public policy. The exoneration proceeding determines whether the judgment can stand. Compensation addresses how the state acknowledges years that cannot be returned.

Missouri amended section 650.058 in 2025. The law now reaches qualifying innocence established after a habeas hearing or a proceeding under section 547.031, as well as qualifying DNA exonerations. It authorizes $179 for each day of postconviction incarceration, subject to a $65,000 fiscal-year payment limit, and permits specified nonmonetary assistance. As of June 21, 2026, Strickland had received no compensation from Missouri.

Lamonte McIntyre

Lamonte McIntyre was seventeen when Kansas City, Kansas police arrested him for a daylight double murder in 1994. He was with his aunt and cousins across town. The prosecution presented no physical evidence connecting him to the shootings and no motive.

The case eventually exposed deeper problems in the identification process. McIntyre’s lawyers developed evidence concerning witness pressure and the conduct of Detective Roger Golubski. The Midwest Innocence Project worked on the case during Bushnell’s leadership.

On October 13, 2017, the prosecution dismissed the charges and McIntyre left prison after more than twenty-three years. He had learned to cut hair as a child and continued the craft inside prison. After release, he opened a barbershop, co-owned a barber academy, entered real estate with his brother, and co-founded Miracle of Innocence to provide legal and reentry help to others.

At release, Kansas had no statute compensating people for wrongful imprisonment. McIntyre had a judicially cleared record and a future to rebuild, but no state-created bridge between the two.

Kansas Compensation Reform

Bushnell and the Midwest Innocence Project helped advocate for the Kansas mistaken-conviction statute enacted in 2018. The law authorizes $65,000 for each year of wrongful imprisonment and $25,000 for each year wrongfully spent on parole, postrelease supervision, or a sex-offender registry.

The law also offers a certificate of innocence, expungement of conviction and arrest records, counseling, health coverage, housing assistance, and tuition support. Those records and benefits can determine whether a wrongfully imprisoned person can prove innocence, find work or housing, return to school, obtain treatment, or rebuild credit.

In February 2020, a Kansas court approved McIntyre’s award of $1,553,379.45 for 8,583 days in prison. The order also granted a certificate of innocence, expungement, counseling, state health benefits, a postsecondary tuition-and-fee waiver, and attorney fees.

McIntyre’s exoneration helped make the absence of a compensation law visible. The statute then converted that visibility into a repeatable remedy available to the next qualifying person, not only the client whose case revealed the gap.

Lamar Johnson and the Reopening Barrier

Lamar Johnson’s case supplied the clearest explanation for why section 547.031 was necessary. A St. Louis conviction-integrity review identified undisclosed police payments to a principal eyewitness, confessions by two other men, information concerning a jailhouse witness, and additional evidence undermining the 1995 murder conviction.

In 2019, Circuit Attorney Kimberly Gardner filed a motion for a new trial. The Missouri courts held that the ordinary criminal rules supplied neither authority for such a filing decades after judgment nor an appellate route to reach the merits. The 2021 Missouri Supreme Court decision stated the procedural absence precisely: appellate jurisdiction depended on a legislative grant that was missing.

The General Assembly supplied that authority through section 547.031. The new proceeding did not extend the old twenty-five-day new-trial deadline. It created a distinct action in which a prosecutor could present later-developed innocence and constitutional evidence under a defined burden.

The St. Louis Circuit Attorney used that procedure for Johnson. After an evidentiary hearing, the court vacated his conviction on February 14, 2023. He left custody after more than twenty-seven years. Bushnell’s work at the Midwest Innocence Project connected the client’s proof to a procedural reform that allowed the proof to be heard.

Christopher Dunn Through Appeal

Christopher Dunn was convicted of a 1990 St. Louis murder principally on identifications by two teenage witnesses. In a 2017 habeas proceeding, he presented recantations, another eyewitness, and alibi evidence. The circuit court found that no jury would convict on the later record but held that Missouri did not then permit a freestanding actual-innocence habeas claim for a noncapital prisoner.

The St. Louis Circuit Attorney filed under section 547.031 in 2024. Bushnell and Rachel Wester of the Midwest Innocence Project represented Dunn with Justin Bonus and Jonathan Potts. After a hearing, the circuit court found clear and convincing evidence of actual innocence and vacated the convictions.

An emergency stay delayed release. On July 30, 2024, the Missouri Supreme Court lifted the stay, the Circuit Attorney dismissed the charges, and Dunn left prison after thirty-three years.

The judgment then moved through a full appellate sequence. In April 2025, the Missouri Supreme Court held that the State could appeal a judgment granting a section 547.031 motion and returned the case to the Eastern District. On May 19, 2026, that court unanimously affirmed.

Its opinion approved consideration of the earlier habeas record, the circuit court’s management of testimony, and the substantial evidence supporting Dunn’s actual innocence.

System Reviews at the Quattrone Center

Bushnell led the Midwest Innocence Project for twelve years. Penn Carey Law credits that tenure with seventeen exonerations or releases, including Strickland, Johnson, Dunn, and McIntyre; the Kansas compensation statute; and new law-school innocence clinics.

At the Quattrone Center, Bushnell directs structured reviews that bring prosecutors, police, defense lawyers, courts, and other participants together to identify how an erroneous outcome developed and which procedures can prevent repetition.

The Wayne County Sentinel Event Review Team applied that method to Eric Anderson. He was convicted of armed robbery in 2010 and sentenced to thirty to fifty years. The case rested on one eyewitness identification without corroborating physical evidence. Nearly nine years later, a confession prompted a conviction-integrity reinvestigation, and Anderson was released on April 30, 2019.

The review brought prosecutors, police, defense lawyers, courts, and others together to examine how the conviction failed without assigning blame. Released in November 2025, it identified forty contributing factors and produced twenty-five agreed recommendations on eyewitness evidence, investigation management, corroboration, alibi development, defense resources, training, oversight, community partnerships, and pretrial procedure.

The Two-Dollar Test

The Quattrone Center’s system work also reaches errors that occur before a full investigation or trial. Color-based field drug kits can produce a quick presumptive result from a chemical reaction. They were never designed to serve as conclusive laboratory identification, yet a positive color has frequently become the basis for arrest and a guilty plea.

A Quattrone study estimated that approximately 773,000 of more than 1.5 million annual drug arrests involve presumptive color tests and that as many as 30,000 people who possess no controlled substance may be falsely implicated each year. The plea process magnifies the danger: a person facing detention can accept conviction before an accredited laboratory tests the material.

Under Bushnell’s leadership, the Center joined a coalition supporting Colorado House Bill 26-1020. The House passed it 65–0 and the Senate 33–0. Governor Jared Polis signed it on March 26, 2026.

The enacted law requires a summons rather than arrest when a colorimetric test is the sole basis for specified low-level possession suspicions. Before accepting pleas in covered possession cases, courts must advise defendants that the tests have known error rates and that they may plead not guilty and request testing by an accredited forensic laboratory.

“Colorado’s unanimous reform reminds us that justice need not be partisan,” Bushnell said. The reform changed police practice: a color test alone could no longer justify jail or a plea without disclosure of the test’s limits and the right to laboratory confirmation.

Innocence Representation and System Reform

Bushnell was born in California and was the first person in her family to attend college. She graduated from Bucknell University and NYU School of Law. At NYU, work on Emmanuel Gissendanner’s Alabama death-penalty case directed her toward criminal justice.

Her later work included the Equal Justice Initiative, the University of Wisconsin Law School, Kirkland & Ellis, the ACLU of Missouri, the Innocence Network, and twelve years as executive director and lead attorney of the Midwest Innocence Project.

Her work now combines innocence representation, organizational leadership, legislative advocacy, sentinel-event review, and empirical research on wrongful convictions.

Release, Compensation, and Reform

Strickland’s case required a hearing that did not exist until 2021. Johnson’s case showed why Missouri needed to create it. Dunn’s case carried the new procedure through a complete appeal. McIntyre’s release exposed the absence of compensation in Kansas; the statute that followed provided money, records relief, health care, education, and a certificate of innocence.

The Anderson review produced forty identified contributing factors and twenty-five reforms. Colorado’s field-test law addresses an earlier stage by changing arrest and plea procedures before a presumptive color reaction can become a conviction.

Bushnell’s question—“what do we owe him for the wrong that we did?”—encompasses release, affirmed exoneration, compensation, expungement, health care, education, and procedures designed to prevent another wrongful conviction.