Midwest
Missouri halts release of man with overturned murder conviction as he was about to go free
- While Christopher Dunn, whose murder conviction was overturned, was signing paperwork to be released from prison, the Missouri Supreme Court issued a ruling that put his freedom on hold.
- Among the key evidence used to convict Dunn of first-degree murder was testimony from two boys who were at the scene of the shooting. Both later recanted their testimony, saying they had been coerced by police and prosecutors.
- Attorney General Andrew Bailey’s office has opposed challenges to several convictions.
The Missouri Supreme Court halted the immediate release Wednesday of a man whose murder conviction was overturned — just as the man was about to walk free.
A St. Louis Circuit Court judge had ordered Christopher Dunn, now 52, to be released by 6 p.m. CDT Wednesday and threatened the prison warden with contempt if Dunn remained imprisoned. But Republican Attorney General Andrew Bailey has been fighting Dunn’s release.
The situation was chaotic as the deadline set by the judge approached. Corrections Department spokesperson Karen Pojmann told The Associated Press that Dunn was out of the prison facility and waiting for a ride. His wife told the AP she was on his way to pick him up. Minutes later, Pojmann corrected herself and said that while Dunn was signing paperwork to be released, the Missouri Supreme Court issued a ruling that put his freedom on hold.
77-YEAR-OLD PHILADELPHIA MAN RELEASED AFTER SERVING DECADES IN PRISON FOR A MURDER HE SAYS HE DID NOT COMMIT
St. Louis Circuit Judge Jason Sengheiser overturned Dunn’s murder conviction Monday, citing evidence of “actual innocence” in the 1990 killing. He ordered Dunn’s immediate release then, but Bailey appealed, and the state Department of Corrections declined to release Dunn.
St. Louis Circuit Attorney Gabe Gore had filed a motion Wednesday urging the judge to immediately order Dunn’s freedom.
“The Attorney General cannot unilaterally decide to ignore this Court’s Order,” Gore wrote.
Christopher Dunn, right, listens to his attorney Justin Bonus, left, during the first day of his hearing to decide whether to vacate his murder conviction on May 21, 2024, at the Carnahan Courthouse in St. Louis. A Missouri judge on July 24, 2024, overturned the conviction of Dunn, who has spent more than 30 years in prison for a killing he has long contended he didn’t commit. (Laurie Skrivan/St. Louis Post-Dispatch via AP, Pool, File)
An attorney for the Department of Corrections told a lawyer in Gore’s office that Bailey advised the agency not to release Dunn until the appeal plays out, according to a court filing. When told it was improper to ignore a court order, the Department of Corrections attorney “responded that the Attorney General’s Office is legal counsel to the DOC and the DOC would be following the advice of counsel.”
Dunn’s attorney, Tricia Rojo Bushnell, the executive director of the Midwest Innocence Project, expressed her frustration.
“What is this bringing to taxpayers in Missouri? What is this use of our resources and our state’s time getting us?” she said. “All it’s doing is keeping innocent people in prison.”
Dunn’s wife said while driving to the prison that they were numb when he didn’t get out earlier this week.
“If you know a little about the story, you know we’ve had a lot of disappointments where we thought we’d finally get his freedom and it was snatched away,” Kira Dunn said. “So we were just bracing ourselves.”
Dunn’s situation is similar to what happened to Sandra Hemme.
The 64-year-old woman spent 43 years in prison for the fatal stabbing of a woman in St. Joseph in 1980. A judge on June 14 cited evidence of “actual innocence” and overturned her conviction. She had been the longest held wrongly incarcerated woman known in the U.S., according to the National Innocence Project, which worked to free Hemme.
Appeals by Bailey — all the way up to the Missouri Supreme Court — kept Hemme imprisoned at the Chillicothe Correctional Center. During a court hearing Friday, Judge Ryan Horsman said that if Hemme wasn’t released within hours, Bailey himself would have to appear in court with contempt of court on the table. Hemme was released later that day.
The judge also scolded Bailey’s office for calling the warden and telling prison officials not to release Hemme after he ordered her to be freed on her own recognizance.
Dunn, who is Black, was 18 in 1990 when 15-year-old Ricco Rogers was killed. Among the key evidence used to convict him of first-degree murder was testimony from two boys who were at the scene of the shooting. Both later recanted their testimony, saying they had been coerced by police and prosecutors.
At an evidentiary hearing in 2020, another judge agreed that a jury would likely find Dunn not guilty based on new evidence. But that judge, William Hickle, declined to exonerate Dunn, citing a 2016 Missouri Supreme Court ruling that only death row inmates — not those like Dunn sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole — could make a “freestanding” claim of actual innocence.
A 2021 law now allows prosecutors to seek court hearings in cases with new evidence of a wrongful conviction.
Although Bailey’s office is not required to oppose such efforts, lawyers for his office said at the hearing that initial testimony from two boys at the scene who identified Dunn as the shooter was correct, even though they recanted as adults.
He also raised opposition at a hearing for Lamar Johnson, who spent 28 years in prison for murder. Another St. Louis judge ruled in February 2023 that Johnson was wrongfully convicted, and he was freed.
Another hearing begins Aug. 21 for death row inmate Marcellus Williams. Bailey’s office is opposing the challenge to Williams’ conviction, too. Timing is of the essence: Williams is scheduled to be executed Sept. 24.
Steven Puro, professor emeritus of political science at St. Louis University, said Bailey is in a highly competitive race for the attorney general position with the primary quickly approaching on Aug. 6.
“Bailey is trying to show that he is, quote, ‘tough on crime,’ which is a very important Republican conservative position,” he said. “Clearly, he’s angering members of the judicial system that he will have to argue before in the future. But he’s making the strategic notion that he needs to get his name before the voters and try to use that to win the primary election.”
Michael Wolff, a former Missouri Supreme Court judge and chief justice, agreed, saying it seems this has become political for Bailey.
“But one of the things is that no matter what your beliefs are, if a court orders something to happen, it’s not your purview to say no,” he said. “The court has to be obeyed.”
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Wisconsin
The retired college professor fighting a $313 trespassing ticket in Wisconsin thinks he’s part of a national struggle | Fortune
“Lake Michigan has sort of got a personality,” Paul Florsheim said wryly, as if describing an old friend rather than the center of a legal battle that has consumed the last year of his life. “It changes its moods all the time. I go all throughout the year, even in the bitterest part of winter, because it’s just beautiful down there. You have these ice flows, and they’re sort of like volcanoes, and the waves come crashing through these structures. It’s like another world.”
Florsheim has been walking that world, a stretch of the Lake Michigan shoreline in Shorewood, Wis., a small village north of Milwaukee, for more than 50 years, since his childhood. He walked it with his parents. He walked it when he returned to his hometown in 2008 after 30 years away. He walked it with his dog in the early mornings, before anyone else was out, in every season.
Courtesy Florsheim’s stepdaughter Jessica Lakind and her mother Marcy Lichterman
And when the recently retired UW-Milwaukee professor walked the route last year, the Village of Shorewood issued him a $313 trespassing ticket for doing so. Now, he’s one face of a growing trend: America’s public waterfronts are increasingly … less so.
Florsheim’s legal fight is winding its way through the Milwaukee County Circuit Court, on his way, he hopes, to the Wisconsin Supreme Court. Florsheim thinks the stakes are considerably larger than one man’s morning walk. He sees the same dynamic at work in the Texas Supreme Court’s June 19 ruling that handed Elon Musk’s SpaceX effective control over Boca Chica Beach—known locally as “poor man’s beach”—and in the wave of data center projects now competing for access to Great Lakes freshwater.
“If we don’t stand up for what is ours, sort of collectively ours, we’re going to regret it down the road,” he told Fortune.” People don’t want to give up what belongs to them, just as members of the citizenry. And I do think that’s what’s resonating right now.”
Exclusivity in the public realm
Florsheim’s case began when his neighbor—a dentist who built a boathouse on the beach and monitored foot traffic from it—began calling cops on walkers. When Shorewood issued him the ticket, Florsheim’s first instinct was to fight it. When the village lawyer called before the Dec. 2024 trial and encouraged him to settle, warning of mounting court fees, Florsheim declined. When the trial began, it drew a packed courtroom, and the NPR member station story previewing it became the most-read piece in the station’s history, per Florsheim.
He’s well aware about what makes his case unusual. “A water policy professor at UW told me, ‘I’ve been waiting for a case like this my whole life.’ And I said, ‘What do you mean? This must happen all the time.’ She said, ‘No, it doesn’t. People probably get tickets with some regularity for walking on the private part of the beach, but nobody fights them.’” The retired professor, the grandson of the founder of Florsheim Shoes, paused: he had the resources to lead the charge. “The average person would not be doing what I’m doing. I’m retired, so I have the time. Would I be doing this if I was hiring a lawyer? The honest answer is probably no.”
Courtesy Florsheim’s stepdaughter Jessica Lakind and her mother Marcy Lichterman
Wisconsin, like most states, recognizes the “Ordinary High Water Mark”—the line where exposed shoreline ends and open water begins—as the boundary of public ownership. But where many states allow the public to cross private beachfront in transit to reach those publicly held waters (also known as “riparian” access) Wisconsin grants landowners exclusive control over that strip of shoreline. You can boat, fish, or swim freely if you’re in the water, but you just can’t set foot on the sand to get there.
The charge rests on Doemel v. Jantz, a 1923 Wisconsin Supreme Court ruling that Florsheim has spent months researching. He said he contacted the archivist at the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh, which sits on Lake Winnebago where the original dispute originated, finding that it involved a dairy farmer’s right to walk his cattle through the privately owned property to get to the publicly owned water. If his cattle remained in the public water, he was golden; if they crossed that barrier onto sand, not so.
The municipal judge who ruled against him in January wrote a 16-page opinion—extraordinary for a small municipal court—holding that she was bound by Doemel, but that it “probably should be revisited and perhaps overturned.” On June 22, Florsheim’s attorneys filed their response brief with the circuit court, arguing the land he walked is owned by the state of Wisconsin, not his neighbor. “It is decidedly not his land; it is the public’s land,” the brief states. The access to that land, Florsheim argues, doesn’t require a public vote to be protected. “The access to the beach is part of the public trust doctrine, which is baked into the state’s constitution,” he said. “So even though there hasn’t been a vote, there really doesn’t need to be, because it is established.” A hearing is set for August 13.
He is also clear about where his fight sits in the broader picture. His “bitter feud,” he says, is not with the dentist. “My bitter feud is much more with the village, because they should be protecting the rights of the general citizenry rather than the property owners on the beach.”
The ‘poor man’s beach’ in Texas ceded to SpaceX
A similar phenomenon playing out some 1,400 miles south. On June 19, the Texas Supreme Court unanimously ruled that SaveRGV, the Sierra Club, and the Carrizo/Comecrudo Nation of Texas had no legal standing to challenge SpaceX’s closure of Boca Chica Beach during rocket launches. The state’s attorney general had intervened to defend SpaceX throughout, never reaching the constitutional question of whether a 2009 amendment, backed by 77% of Texas voters protecting public beach access, outweighed a 2013 law written specifically for SpaceX. The court dismissed on standing. “The affected public has no remedy to enforce their constitutional right to access their own beach,” Marisa Perales, the attorney for the groups, told Fortune. That same week, Musk became the world’s first trillionaire following SpaceX’s record-breaking $75 billion IPO.
Boca Chica Beach is a free, undeveloped eight-mile stretch of Gulf shoreline near Brownsville—the southernmost city in Texas—where Highway 4 dead-ends at the water and SpaceX’s Starbase launch towers loom to the north. The stretch of Gulf shoreline, known locally as “poor man’s beach,” is the last wild, free, publicly accessible beach on the southernmost tip of Texas.
The Boca Chica takeover had been proceeding on the ground regardless of the litigation. SpaceX employees voted to incorporate the area as the city of Starbase in 2025; just as the county handed the new municipality authority to close the beach during launches. In Feb., Starbase officials voted to annex 7,133 additional acres near the beach, much of it within the Boca Chica Wildlife Refuge. The court ruling removed the last legal obstacle. “Starbase is clearly Elon Musk’s company town,” South Texas Environmental Justice Network co-founder Bekah Hinojosa told The Texas Tribune. Neither the Village of Shorewood, the Texas General Land Office, a lawyer representing the environmental groups, nor SpaceX responded to Fortune’s requests for comment.
Data centers in the Midwest and afar
Closer to Florsheim in the Midwest, over 220 data centers are planned across the Great Lakes region, drawn by the basin’s freshwater—21% of the world’s surface supply—for server cooling. Microsoft is investing $20 billion in data centers at Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin, a community that straddles the Great Lakes basin line and can divert lake water. Midwest Environmental Advocates—the same nonprofit representing Florsheim—sued after Racine, Wis. withheld public records on a data center’s water consumption for seven months. Fewer than one-third of data centers currently track water usage, and in Great Lakes states the reporting obligation falls on public water systems, not the corporate users drawing from them.
“A lot of these data centers want to be near the Great Lakes,” Florsheim said. “The question of what is in the public domain, and should we allow that to become privatized — that’s what’s ringing. It’s not just the beach. It’s the water. It’s who owns the resources that belong to all of us. And I think people are standing up.”
The problem goes beyond the Great Lakes region as well, and well beyond the country’s shorelines. In July 2025, President Donald Trump signed an executive order directing federal agencies to use “federally owned land and resources for the expeditious and orderly development of data centers,” fast-tracking construction on Department of Energy sites and opening military bases to proposals.
The order’s reach has extended to places once considered untouchable: in Northern Virginia, data center construction has pushed directly against Manassas National Battlefield Park, a Civil War site that saw 541,000 visitors in 2024, bounded on three sides by federal land, as part of a broader buildout that has made Virginia home to 663 operating data centers with another 595 planned, facilities that collectively handle roughly 70% of the world’s internet traffic. The pattern is consistent: public land, identified as available, converted to private use.
Florsheim still walks the beach and plans to keep walking it as he awaits the August 13 hearing.
“It’s become much bigger than my little spat on the beach,” he said. “I do feel confident that we will eventually prevail.”
Rick Mahorn talks about why he settled in Detroit
Rick Mahorn talks about the appeal of Detroit as a place to live and raise a family.
Hartford, Connecticut may be Rick Mahorn’s hometown, but Detroit has his heart.
The original Pistons’ “Bad Boy” has worn many hats in basketball, from player to coach to broadcaster, but now he is back in the coaching realm leading Detroit’s BIG3 team, the Detroit Amps.
“The city has always been good to me, I figured I have to give something back,” Mahorn said about coming back and representing Detroit. “The fact is that I made Detroit home and one thing about Detroit, it’s always going to love me and Imma love Detroit.”
Mahorn spent 18 seasons in the NBA and won the 1989 championship with the Pistons. After retirement in 1999 as a Philadelphia 76er, he started his coaching career with the Atlanta Hawks, and the “coaching phase” never faded.
Serving as the assistant coach for the Detroit Shock for four years, he helped lead them to two championships and moved up to the head coach position before the franchise was relocated.
Years later he joined the BIG3 when it launched in 2017 as the head coach for the Trilogy and won the league’s first ever championship, along with its first ever Coach of the Year Award. He recently stepped back into coaching for the BIG3 as the Amps coach.
Along with his love for coaching, his love for the Pistons was at the heart of it. In between each coaching position, he took a break to focus on being a color analyst for the Pistons radio network and recently completed his 20th season in that role.
“It keeps calling me back, but the thing I love about coaching is that you have to ‘each one, teach one,’” Mahorn said. “Someone taught me as a coach, that kept me on the straight and narrow, making sure I was always positive about what I do for a living, but basketball opens up so many avenues.”
Founded by Ice Cube and Jeff Kwatinetz, the BIG3 played its inaugural season in January 2017 with eight teams. It expanded to 12 teams in 2019 but dropped back to eight with new cities and logos.
Detroit was a part of the rebrand with the Detroit Amps, also known as the Detroit Amplifiers, and they joined the league last season.
Although this isn’t Mahorn’s first rodeo coaching in the BIG3, or coaching Detroit basketball, it is his first season coaching the Amps after taking over the role following the former coach, hall of famer George Gervin.
Mahorn technically never left the Detroit fan base, and has continuously been connected with the Pistons, but it is still a great feeling for him to be back coaching on Detroit’s side for the Amps.
“What they do to me is keep me young. You think you getting old and the next thing you know you’re coaching some young guys,” Mahorn said. “I want them to have the respect of being a professional. The fact is they’re the ones carrying the torch later.”
Ice Cube or Kwatinetz weren’t in attendance Saturday, but Ice Cube’s son, Oshea Jackson Jr., was present and working with CBS Sports on interviews.
Other celebrities came out to support, like Pistons forward Ronald Holland, former Detroit Amps head coach and hall of famer George Gervin, and local artist Payroll Giovanni, who performed at halftime of the Amps game.
Week two of season nine kicked off Saturday, and the Amps continued their losing streak, falling to 0-2 after a 51- 44 loss to Miami 305.
This isn’t the only time Michiganders will see the league this season at Little Caesars Arena. It will be back for week six on July 23.
“Detroit is a beautiful city — it’s a hardworking city,” Mahorn said. “One thing about Detroit: they embrace everybody that comes back, that’s done some things — the championships I have in my repertoire, but it’s just the fact that I just love Detroit.”
BIG3 WEEK TWO RESULTS
Game 1: Dallas Power 50, LA Riot 33
Game 2: Chicago Triplets 51, DMV Trilogy 49
Game 3: Miami 305 51, Detroit Amps 44
Game 4: Boston Ball Hogs 51, Houston Rig Hands 36
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