Marvin Teer, the Chief Trial Attorney at the Circuit Attorney’s Office (CAO), is leaving at the end of this month after serving in that role for approximately two years. When Marvin came aboard the already floundering ship, we in the 22nd Judicial Circuit — judges, assistant prosecutors, and defense attorneys — were hopeful. Marvin had been a trial prosecutor with Jennifer Joyce and had handled serious cases, and later he became both a municipal and administrative law judge. He had the chops. He came back to St. Louis from retirement to help Kim Gardner. If only Gardner would give him the authority to do what we knew he could do, and then didn’t get in his way, we thought Marvin might turn things around.
He was hired by Gardner after the CAO had just lost two important battles in dealing with their mounting caseload (caused by having insufficient trial staff). The CAO had gotten caught assigning many serious cases to an assistant prosecutor who was out on maternity leave (a not-so-clever trick to reduce the caseload of its other prosecutors). When this didn’t work, the CAO tried to farm out cases to hand-picked, out-state prosecutors, citing “a conflict of interest.” As there was no genuine conflict of interest, only a backlog of cases, a judge told them Missouri law wouldn’t allow that. (Interestingly, while statutes do permit any prosecuting attorney’s office that needs help to ask the Governor or Attorney General for assistance, Gardner had never sought their aid — presumably because in doing so, she would lose control over how those cases were handled.)
One of the cases involved in both fiascoes was the Dorn murder case. Two young men were charged with being involved in the murder of retired police Captain David Dorn: Stephan Cannon was charged with shooting Dorn, and Mark Jackson was charged with being his accessory. I represented Jackson.
During a period of widespread looting after George Floyd’s death in Minnesota, Jackson had driven Cannon to and from a pawn shop late at night to engage in looting. Video from the store’s interior showed my client inside with several other persons when the shooting started outside. As they all ran toward the door in a panic, Jackson tripped and was trampled by the others fleeing the store. He dropped his debit card in the confusion. When he finally was able to get to his car, he met up with Cannon, and they left the scene together. Jackson didn’t know Cannon was armed or had shot anyone until Cannon later told him. The debit card led the police to Jackson, and he was charged as Cannon’s accessory to the murder.
There was no video footage of the shooting itself, and no witnesses to the actual shooting. Dorn had gone to the pawn shop to protect it from looters and had been shot. A video of him lying on the pavement dying had been uploaded to social media. Marvin was assigned to this very high-profile case. He wanted to convict the shooter and recognized that he needed Jackson’s testimony — that he was with Cannon and that Cannon had confessed to him — to secure a conviction. And so a deal was struck for Jackson to testify against Cannon. The deal called for the murder charges to be dropped, and my client was to receive probation on burglary charges in exchange for his testimony.
Marvin did go on to convince a jury to convict Stephan Cannon of murder in the first degree, and Cannon’s conviction rested in large part on the testimony of my client. Dorn’s wife, Ann Dorn, said outside the courthouse after the verdicts, “I want to thank Marvin Teer for doing a phenomenal job in prosecuting the case.” This is what we expected Marvin to deliver when he came to help Kim Gardner.
On the morning of Jackson’s plea, the same week the jury found Cannon guilty, I received a telephone call from Marvin. He was extremely upset. Gardner had just told him not to drop the murder charge against Jackson — to not go through with the deal. This was after Jackson had met with prosecutors and told them about his involvement, after he had been deposed by Cannon’s defense attorney, and after he had testified in court to secure a conviction. Marvin, almost in tears, told me that he was going to continue “working on Kim” and would update me.
I called our plea judge to update her on the situation and then began researching judicial enforcement of a plea agreement. But I didn’t take any of the case law I found with me to court. As I thought about the situation, I realized I didn’t need a judge to enforce the deal. Marvin, above everything else, is an honorable man. I knew in my gut that he would go through with the agreement, regardless of whether he received Gardner’s approval. I suspect if Gardner had still refused to abide by the deal, he would have gone through with it and then resigned.
In the end, Marvin was able to convince Gardner to follow through on their agreement. Jackson’s murder charge was dismissed, and he received probation.
That episode, however, told me that Marvin’s days in the CAO were numbered.
Marvin is a rock-solid, competent trial prosecutor. He’s a man of his word. He’s reasonable to deal with. He gets along with everyone. He is respected by everyone. He’s everything you could want in a prosecutor. As Chief Trial Attorney, the person in charge of the trial staff, he had both the courtroom and interpersonal skills to enable him to work with his prosecutors, the judges, and defense attorneys to get the 22nd Judicial Circuit back to working smoothly. Any sensible elected prosecutor would simply have let Marvin loose to upright the ship. As he demonstrated with his handling of the Dorn case, Marvin has the ability to see what needs to be done, what to do to get that done, and how to follow through.
But, Kim Gardner isn’t a sensible elected prosecutor. And she was already second-guessing him in his handling of the Dorn case. This pattern has, not surprisingly, continued and only gained momentum. Marvin did what he could but he couldn’t save the ship. The ship’s captain wouldn’t let him. I think Marvin realized that with Kim at the helm it was a lost cause.
Thanks for trying though, Marvin.
