Tricia Rojo Bushnell

No gun, motive or physical evidence had tied McIntyre to the killings, and he had been across town with his aunt and cousins; eyewitness identification sent him to prison for two life terms. Witnesses later recanted, and at a hearing on his case Wyandotte County District Attorney Mark Dupree asked the court to find “manifest injustice.” The judge vacated the convictions and freed McIntyre after more than twenty-three years. Bushnell described the moment as “both happiness and sadness.” Kansas was then one of eighteen states with no law compensating the wrongfully convicted.

8,583 Days

Bushnell helped pass Kansas's compensation law in 2018. It pays $65,000 for each year of wrongful imprisonment and at least $25,000 for each year on parole, postrelease supervision or an offender registry, and it provides a certificate of innocence, the purging of conviction and arrest records, state health coverage, tuition assistance and counseling.

In February 2020 a Shawnee County judge approved McIntyre's award under the law: $1,553,379.45 for 8,583 days in prison, a certificate of innocence, expungement of his conviction, arrest and DNA profile, counseling, state health benefits, a tuition-and-fee waiver for up to 130 credit hours and attorney fees.

Testifying before the Kansas House Judiciary Committee in March 2024, Bushnell named the project's clients Floyd Bledsoe, Richard Jones and McIntyre as “the impetus” for the law. The project had also represented Olin “Pete” Coones, who died in 2021, 108 days after his exoneration; his family received compensation after his death.

Section 547.031

Kevin Strickland was eighteen when Larry Ingram, John Walker and Sherrie Black were shot to death in a Kansas City house on April 25, 1978. Cynthia Douglas, who survived, picked him out of a lineup; after a hung jury, a second jury convicted him in 1979, and he was sentenced to life without parole. That year Vincent Bell and Kilm Adkins, who confessed to being part of the group, told police Strickland was uninvolved. Douglas later told family and friends she had identified the wrong man, asked the Midwest Innocence Project for help in 2009 and died in 2015.

In 2021 Missouri enacted section 547.031, which lets the prosecutor in the county of conviction move to vacate a judgment on information that the person may be innocent or wrongly convicted. The court must hold a hearing, at which the attorney general may appear, and must grant the motion on clear and convincing evidence of actual innocence or of constitutional error that undermines confidence in the judgment.

Jackson County Prosecutor Jean Peters Baker filed under the statute that August, and Bushnell helped represent Strickland. Attorney General Eric Schmitt's office opposed them. Its requests led to the recusal of every Jackson County circuit judge and the appointment of Judge James Welsh, a retired appellate judge; it asked that the case be retitled State of Missouri v. Jean Peters Baker, which Welsh refused; and at the hearing its lawyers called the recantation evidence “hearsay, upon hearsay, upon hearsay.”

On November 23, 2021, Welsh found “clear and convincing evidence that undermines the Court's confidence in the judgment of conviction.” That afternoon Strickland, sixty-two, walked out of the Western Missouri Correctional Center in Cameron after forty-three years. Missouri's restitution law then covered only DNA exonerations, and the project opened a fundraiser for him. In 2025 the legislature extended restitution to people found innocent after a habeas hearing or on a prosecutor's motion to vacate, at $179 for each day of postconviction incarceration.

Eight Photographs

Marcus Boyd was shot to death on a St. Louis porch in 1994. On July 12, 1995, a jury found Lamar Johnson guilty of his murder, and he was sentenced to life without parole. Two other men later confessed to the killing.

Under the new statute, Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner brought the case to a five-day hearing in December 2022. One of the men who had confessed described how and why the killing happened, and the only eyewitness, Greg Elking, testified that he “couldn't really see anything that night” and had felt pressured to pick Johnson. The attorney general's office argued that a witness could identify a masked gunman by his eyes alone and filed a brief with eight photographs of Johnson's face with lines drawn on them.

Bushnell represented Johnson with Lindsay Runnels and Matthew Jacober. On February 14, 2023, Judge David C. Mason ruled that police had “so directly interfered” with Elking's identification that it was tainted, that the state had withheld impeachment evidence, and that the testimony amounted to “clear and convincing evidence that Lamar Johnson is innocent.” Johnson walked free that day after more than twenty-eight years in custody.

Obligated to Consider

Ricco Rogers, fifteen, was shot to death outside a St. Louis home in May 1990. Two boys, DeMorris Stepp, fourteen, and Michael Davis Jr., twelve, identified Christopher Dunn as the gunman, and in July 1991 a jury convicted Dunn of murder; he was sentenced to life without parole. Both boys later recanted. Davis said he had named Dunn because he believed Dunn belonged to a rival gang.

In February 2024, St. Louis Circuit Attorney Gabe Gore moved under section 547.031 to vacate the conviction, and Bushnell and Rachel Wester of the Midwest Innocence Project represented Dunn with Justin Bonus and Jonathan Potts. On July 22, 2024, Judge Jason M. Sengheiser found that Gore had made “a clear and convincing showing of ‘actual innocence’” and ordered Dunn released. Attorney General Andrew Bailey appealed. On July 30, after Gore told the court he would not seek a new trial, Dunn, fifty-two, walked out of the St. Louis city jail after thirty-four years. “I never gave up because my family never gave up,” he said.

On May 19, 2026, Chief Judge John P. Torbitzky and Judges James M. Dowd and Michael S. Wright of the Missouri Court of Appeals, Eastern District, unanimously affirmed. Section 547.031, they held, “obligated the circuit court to consider” the record of Dunn's earlier habeas case.

The Only Employee

Born in California, Bushnell was a first-generation college student and graduated from Bucknell University. At New York University School of Law she worked on the case of Emmanuel Gissendanner, wrongfully convicted and sentenced to death in Alabama, and she went on to the Equal Justice Initiative, Kirkland & Ellis and a clinical teaching post at the University of Wisconsin. She was the Midwest Innocence Project's only employee when she started there; twelve years later she left it with a staff of twelve serving Missouri, Kansas, Arkansas, Iowa and Nebraska, and with the project she had helped establish several law-school innocence clinics. She has served as president of the Innocence Network and of the ACLU of Missouri.

On August 1, 2025, she became executive director of the Quattrone Center for the Fair Administration of Justice at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School, succeeding John Hollway, who stayed on to lead its sentinel-event reviews. That November the Wayne County Prosecutor's Office in Michigan released the review the Center had coordinated of the conviction of Eric Anderson, sentenced in 2010 to thirty to fifty years for armed robbery on one eyewitness's account and freed on April 30, 2019, after a sworn confession from one of the actual robbers reopened the case. Prosecutors, Detroit police, the county's circuit court, the State Appellate Defender Office and the Cooley Innocence Project traced how the errors accumulated from the identification through trial, identified forty contributing factors and offered twenty-five recommendations, among them closer evaluation and corroboration of eyewitness identifications, the pursuit of alibi evidence, training and oversight of counsel, and adequate funding across the system.

Known Error Rates

Color-based field kits give police a presumptive drug result from a chemical reaction, and a positive color can lead to an arrest and a guilty plea before any laboratory tests the substance. The Quattrone Center's January 2024 report, Guilty Until Proven Innocent, estimated that about 773,000 of the more than 1.5 million drug arrests in the United States each year involve such tests and that about 30,000 people who possess no controlled substance are falsely implicated and arrested. Under Bushnell the Center joined the Korey Wise Innocence Project, the Innocence Project, the Reason Foundation and the Roadside Drug Test Alliance in supporting Colorado House Bill 26-1020. The House passed it 65–0, the Senate passed it unanimously, and Governor Jared Polis signed it on March 26, 2026.

When a color test is the only basis for suspecting a low-level possession offense, officers must issue a summons and release the person. Before accepting a plea in a covered case, a court must advise the defendant that the tests have “known error rates” and that the defendant may plead not guilty and ask for testing by an accredited forensic laboratory. “Colorado’s unanimous reform reminds us that justice need not be partisan,” Bushnell said.

Off The Top

McIntyre co-founded Miracle of Innocence, which helps the wrongfully incarcerated with legal representation and reentry. With his brother he runs McIntosh Property Group, buying, renovating and selling properties in Phoenix, where he lives with his wife. He had cut hair since he was eleven and kept cutting it in prison. In Kansas City, Kansas, he opened Off The Top Barbershop, and he co-owns Headlines Barber Academy, which trains barbers.