A St. Louis cop sent a Black man to prison — the jury never heard about the officer’s past

Crouched behind a dumpster in a St. Louis alley, Officer Steven Pinkerton heard gunshots.

It was after midnight on Aug. 10, 2013, in the Dutchtown neighborhood and an argument that had been building for hours among a group of young men had escalated into a shootout. Pinkerton said he saw two men rush by the mouth of the alley, shooting as they ran. He couldn’t see what happened next — if anyone had been shot.

After a few minutes, one man, holding a gun, ran down the alley where Pinkerton was staked out.

The longtime St. Louis Metropolitan Police officer raised his upper torso above the dumpster, he’d later say in a deposition, and ordered the man to stop. It was one of the shooters , trying to flee, Pinkerton thought — possibly one he’d seen run by earlier but he “couldn’t really tell at that point,” he later said. When the man kept running, and appeared to raise his gun, Pinkerton fired five shots. He thought he hit him — the man was “kind of staggering,” Pinkerton later said — but he escaped.

Pinkerton, who is white, said he only saw the man’s face for a few seconds and couldn’t determine his age or note any distinguishing characteristics. He was Black, 6 feet, 2 inches tall, weighed about 180 pounds and bald, according to Pinkerton. He wore blue jeans and a black shirt.

Around 15 minutes after Pinkerton fired his gun, other officers arrested Kurtis Watkins, a 23-year-old Black man, two blocks away. Pinkerton identified him as the man he had seen run through the alley.

Based solely on Pinkerton’s account, Watkins has been incarcerated for the last 11 years, convicted of shooting and critically injuring a man.

Watkins says he had nothing to do with it. In his account, he wasn’t at the scene of the shooting or in the alley that night: He was walking from a friend’s house to a convenience store when he got arrested. He says he didn’t know the victim or anyone involved.

He had no discernible motive for the shooting. There was no physical evidence. None of the witnesses to the shooting said they knew who he was. Another man who was apprehended and convicted in the shooting testified he’d never met Watkins before.

Everyone agrees that the sole evidence against Watkins was Pinkerton’s account of what he saw from behind the dumpster. The “only issue in this case is identification of the defendant by Officer Steven Pinkerton,” the prosecutor said at Watkins’ trial.

As part of a monthslong investigation, The Independent uncovered two pieces of information about Pinkerton that could have cast doubt on his credibility. But the jury never heard them.

First, less than a year before he arrested Watkins, Pinkerton arrested a man he encountered in a gas station parking lot named Kerwin Harris who he mistakenly believed was the suspect in an earlier robbery. Pinkerton chased the 39-year-old Black man, tackled him to the ground and then held him face-down in a chokehold as another officer shocked him with a Taser.

Harris died at the scene, and the robbery case remains open.

Second, Pinkerton had a history of social media posts denigrating Black people that raised concern from at least one of his colleagues at the time.

“Black people are pathetic,” one of Pinkerton’s Facebook posts read. “You don’t want to be treated equally, you want favored treatment. And you wonder why there is so much animus toward you?”

Watkins, who has been appealing his case for years without success, didn’t know about Pinkerton’s past until he was informed by a reporter from The Independent during a March interview at the Jefferson City Correctional Center, where he is now incarcerated.

“All along, he’s racist,” Watkins said from the visitors’ room of supermax Jefferson City Correctional Center when told about Pinkerton’s history. “They let him put me in prison?”

The law, under the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in the 1963 Brady v. Maryland case, requires prosecutors to notify defense attorneys of credibility issues with witnesses when they could materially affect the outcome of a case. The information about Pinkerton “should have been turned over at trial,” said Vida Johnson, a law professor at Georgetown University.

“He’s already misidentified another suspect. And we also know that he tends to paint Black people with a broad brush,” Johnson said, pointing to the Facebook posts.

Peter Joy, a law professor at Washington University in St. Louis, agreed that the information should have been turned over to the defense because it could have prompted jurors to discount Pinkerton’s testimony.

“When you have a one-witness ID case and the entire case hinges on that one witness,” he said, “then that witness’s credibility is the entire case.”

Pinkerton did not respond to calls, emails and certified letters seeking comment for this story. He appeared to block an Independent reporter on Facebook after several messages went unanswered.

Watkins’ arrest

The night of his arrest began like any other, Watkins remembers, until he “walked into a hostile environment.”

He had spent the evening at his friend’s house, chatting and playing video games — both lived in the neighborhood. He decided to walk to the Conoco gas station to buy liquor for them sometime after midnight, he says.

As he walked on the sidewalk to the gas station, police officers pulled up in a patrol car.

They stopped him, pushed him to the ground and struck him several times on his head and ribs, according to the police report. The officers claimed he was sweaty and out of breath; Watkins said that he was perspiring because it was humid out and that he had been walking, not running. One of the officers used his knee to pin Watkins face-down to the ground.

Watkins says he tried to push back to lessen the pain; the report says he was resisting.

The officers handcuffed him so tightly, he testified later, that his hands went numb.

Police then drove him a few blocks to Pinkerton, who was waiting in the alley.

Watkins was in the back of the van, surrounded by police officers. One of them shone a flashlight on him and Pinkerton peered in.

It took Pinkerton around two seconds to reach a conclusion.

He said at trial he was “100% positive” it was the same person he had encountered in the alley.

Watkins, like the man Pinkerton described, was around 6-foot-2, Black, bald and wearing a black shirt. His jeans were black, not blue, but Pinkerton later said he had meant “blue jeans” as slang for jeans in general.

And although Pinkerton had called for emergency medical services after the man staggered away because he thought he’d shot him, Watkins hadn’t been shot. Pinkerton’s gun fired five times, but only four bullets were recovered from the scene. The crime scene investigators didn’t find blood in the alleyway. They found a gun on the ground, possibly the one belonging to the man who ran through the alley, but there were no recoverable fingerprints.

Pinkerton also added a new detail after seeing Watkins in the van. He said he remembered seeing large white letters on the man’s shirt.

“It just reminded me of it,” he said at trial.

Watkins’ shirt had the brand “Levi” written across it in white, Watkins said at trial.

Watkins was booked and charged with three counts of first-degree assault, three counts of armed criminal action, unlawful possession of a firearm, unlawful use of a weapon and resisting arrest.

At the time he had five kids, another on the way and two jobs, driving a Frosty’s Treats ice cream truck and working at Popeyes.

He felt like he was getting on the right path, he said, after spending time behind bars for a drug charge and a gun charge. So did his mother, Judy Watkins, who said that at the time “I was thinking that he was going to be OK” — working and caring for his kids. She has long had health problems and expected her son would be the one to provide for her.

Watkins said he declined plea deals because he wanted to prove his innocence.

The man who was shot outside the apartment complex, Darrell Macon, was hospitalized for weeks.

Macon and his family members who witnessed the crime said that shots had been fired by a man they knew named Stephant Hibler. Macon remembered seeing Hibler’s face close to his as Hibler pulled the trigger. Asked by detectives, and then attorneys in depositions, he and his family said they didn’t know who Watkins was. There is no record that the police showed witnesses a lineup of photos that included Watkins. Failure to show such a lineup, according to several experts, could have been a sign of “tunnel vision” in the police investigation — not seeking out evidence that could cast doubt on their suspect.

The Macons were, however, shown a lineup of photos including Hibler and selected Hibler, according to the police report.

Witnesses said they didn’t recognize any of the shooters other than Hibler. At the hospital, according to the police report, Macon himself named another man, an acquaintance who had been present at the fight leading up to the crime, and said he had been a shooter. No records indicate that the officer followed up on the lead.

Macon subsequently denied having made the statement.

At his first trial, Watkins was a co-defendant with Hibler, though both swore they had never met before the trial.

The jury at Watkins’ trial in late 2015 deadlocked on him but convicted Hibler.

Hibler was sentenced to 10 years in prison for the shooting and was released on probation in September of last year. Watkins was retried in early 2016 by a jury that had only one Black member. The jury deliberated for three hours before telling the judge they couldn’t reach a consensus, with four of the twelve jurors holding out against conviction. The judge told them to keep deliberating. Around a half hour later they returned the verdict: Watkins was found guilty on all nine counts. He was sentenced to 25 years in prison.

“What did this have to do with me?” Watkins said during a March interview in the correctional center visitors’ room.

For hours leading up to the fight, Watkins had been at his friend’s house. He and his friend said Watkins didn’t have a gun when he left. Watkins said he didn’t even have a cell phone at the time because he couldn’t afford it, so he’s not sure how he could have been summoned to the fight.

Watkins was the only defense witness at both his 2015 and 2016 trials. The prosecution focused on attacking his credibility because of his prior convictions.

“This is a man who is dangerous and this is a man who needs to be held accountable,” Matt Martin, a prosecutor at the time in the St. Louis Circuit Attorney’s Office, told the jury during the 2016 trial.

“So because I have a background, do I deserve to be in prison for somebody else’s crime?” Watkins asked in an interview.

At trial, Watkins’ public defender, Brian Horneyer, called Pinkerton’s description of the man who ran through the alley — a bald Black man of roughly 180 pounds and six foot two — “about as vague and ambiguous as you could get,” asking: “How many young men in the City of St. Louis fit that description?”

Horneyer raised doubts about the identification. Pinkerton is white and Watkins is Black, and cross-racial identifications are known to be less reliable than identifications within one’s own race. The circumstances — it was the middle of the night, with the added stress of gunfire — could further reduce accuracy.

Experts say a “show-up identification,” where the witness is shown only one person, is far less reliable than a lineup, where the witness must choose from several people.

“Of course he is going to pick up Kurtis,” Horneyer told the jury. “He is the only one there.”

Studies have found that eyewitnesses often misremember details. Under a Missouri Supreme Court decision from 2020, defense attorneys can have experts testify about these studies in order to cast doubt on eyewitness’ accounts. But when Watkins was tried in 2015 and 2016, there was some uncertainty in Missouri about the admissibility of such expert testimony.

Experts interviewed by The Independent said that with the risks of misidentification in this case, jurors might have found such testimony persuasive.

At Watkins’ trial, the prosecutor emphasized Pinkerton’s expertise again and again.

“We are talking about a trained police officer who has been on the force for 20 years,” Martin, the prosecutor, told the jury.

Watkins’ lawyer speculated in court that Pinkerton had been eager to arrest someone quickly, to make up for the fact that the police on the scene had done little to intervene or stop the shooting. He also wondered aloud if Pinkerton had been “distraught” in the aftermath, coloring his identification, out of concern he’d be disciplined for shooting his gun five times.

That prompted Martin to say: “It’s incredible that at this point the defense wants to put Officer Steven Pinkerton on trial.”

A prior mistaken arrest and death

What the defense didn’t know was that Pinkerton had mistakenly arrested a different Black man months prior.

On the morning of Dec. 22, 2012, a Denny’s diner in St. Louis was robbed of $109.

That night, Pinkerton was starting an overnight shift, he wrote in a later police report. He had stopped at a Quiktrip gas station to buy a drink and go to the restroom when he saw a gold Buick Century in the parking lot — the same model that had been used in the Denny’s robbery.

Kerwin Harris was sitting in the car. Harris, like the robber, was Black and wearing glasses and a hat.

Pinkerton ran Harris’ license plate which “revealed no theft on the primary screen,” according to the police report. But as he was waiting for more information to appear and preparing to notify the dispatcher of a possible robbery suspect, Harris started his car.

Pinkerton put on his emergency lights and blocked Harris from backing up. Harris got out and began to run away, according to Pinkerton’s arrest report.

“I believed I was pursuing a robbery suspect,” Pinkerton later wrote.

Pinkerton eventually tackled Harris to the ground, on his stomach. Harris wouldn’t release his arms from under him, Pinkerton said in the reports, and he was worried Harris might be armed because the robber earlier in the day was alleged to have been.

So he sat on Harris’ back and struck his head several times. Harris was unarmed.

Then Pinkerton placed him in a neck restraint because of what he later called Harris’ “strenuous resistance” — a detail that was disputed by several witnesses later interviewed by the police.

The St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department had banned the neck restraint five years earlier.

Other officers soon arrived, and one tased Harris six times against his bare skin.

A witness interviewed by police and quoted in the arrest report said officers struck Harris’ head “against a landscape paving rock several times.”

Another witness said she heard an officer call Harris a racial slur during the arrest. The department didn’t begin using body cameras until 2020, and there is no dashboard-camera footage from the arrest.

When Harris was finally handcuffed, his body went limp, the officers wrote.

The officers checked for a heartbeat and found none. He was taken to Barnes-Jewish Hospital and pronounced dead. He was 39 and had a five-month-old daughter.

Harris was at least 80 pounds heavier than the robber, according to his autopsy alongside witness descriptions. He was also at least two inches taller. The robber wore a green cap, but Harris wore a black one.

Neither witness from that robbery selected Harris’ photo from a lineup. The Denny’s robbery case remains open.

Any internal investigations related to Harris’ death are closed and unavailable under Missouri’s Sunshine Law.

Harris’ family never knew the details of his death until notified by a reporter for The Independent 11 years later.

One of Pinkerton’s colleagues, the homicide detective assigned to the case as scene supervisor, Heather Taylor, testified before a U.S. House of Representatives subcommittee on civil rights and civil liberties in a hearing on white supremacy in local police departments in September 2020.

Even though she didn’t identify Pinkerton or Harris by name in her testimony, the facts of the description fit Harris’ death.

Taylor told the committee the death “haunts me to this day,” and that she personally delivered a copy of the police report to St. Louis’ circuit attorney in 2013, hoping the office might investigate charges against the officer. A request under Missouri’s Sunshine Law filed with the circuit attorney’s office this year by The Independent for copies of documents related to Harris returned no responsive records.

“I just couldn’t believe that there were no charges, there was nothing,” Taylor, who has since retired from the St. Louis Police Department, told the committee.

Taylor declined to comment for this story.

Pinkerton’s social media

Leading up to the trial that convicted Watkins in 2016, Pinkerton was posting negatively about Black people on Facebook, according to posts collected by the Ethical Society of Police dating back to at least 2015. And following the trial, he continued posting.

“You black people are pathetic,” he wrote in one post.

“Having negative feelings about someone or a sub-group of certain people, is different than treating them differently because of it, which I do not,” he wrote in another, referring later in the comment to the “violence and complete disregard for civility in much of the black sub-culture.”

If the case were remanded for a new trial with the credibility evidence allowed, Johnson, the Georgetown professor and former public defender, said Watkins’ lawyer would be able to cross-examine Pinkerton on “all of the pejorative things that Officer Pinkerton has expressed about Black people in the community where he’s supposed to be protecting people.”

Taylor told the 2020 congressional committee: “For nearly seven years, I have repeatedly reported an officer for his racism,” based in part on the officer’s posts.

According to a report from the Ethical Society of Police, which advocates for officers of color in St. Louis, an officer was under internal investigation in 2020 for racially denigrating Facebook posts. Pinkerton is not named, but the report’s description of the officer, including his involvement in the Dec. 2012 death in custody, matches exactly. And The St. Louis American, writing about the report when it was released, named Pinkerton as the officer in question. (That reporter now works for The Independent.)

The Facebook posts, according to the Ethical Society of Police report, centered around George Floyd, the Black man whose murder by white officer Derek Chauvin in Minneapolis that year set off widespread racial justice protests.

That report also discussed the 2012 death of Harris.

“It was later determined that this subject was not involved in the robbery,” the report noted, of Harris.

Pinkerton’s employment with the St. Louis Metro Police ended in May 2021, according to a spokesperson for the department, after he spent 24 years there.

A Facebook account under his name offers a possible explanation for his departure, in the form of at least five posts referring to having been “forced” out of the department for his assessment of the murder of George Floyd. “I was told, my words could have started a riot,” he added in a comment last year.

“For all you mother f—— at the St. Louis Police Department,” one post began last year, “especially the Internal Affairs Division, you can all kiss my a– for condemning me and pushing me out of my decorated career and losing my ability to retire with the benefits I wanted, all because I exposed the corruption behind the prosecution of Derek Chauvin.”

The police department declined to provide any information on an internal investigation or the “circumstances under which his employment ended,” and law enforcement officers’ personnel records are closed under Sunshine Law in Missouri.

But Pinkerton still works as a police officer, with an active license: He has been an officer with the police department in Moscow Mills, a community of 3,300 about 50 miles northwest of St. Louis, since August 2022.

The chief of police in Moscow Mills, Terry Foster, declined to answer a list of questions but confirmed Pinkerton is an active employee.

“I stood up for truth and lost my 25 year career and I would do it all over again,” Pinkerton wrote on Facebook in May.

And he has continued to post denigrating comments about Black people, among other groups including immigrants and women. “Some black folks just disgust me,” one June post read, “in the way they act in simple interactions.”

A reexamination?

Watkins’ lawyer, Kansas City-based Jonathan Sternberg, plans to file a federal habeas corpus petition next month, which will include arguments about the new credibility evidence. He hopes that St. Louis Circuit Attorney Gabe Gore will take up the case for review in his conviction integrity unit.

“I believe he’s innocent,” Sternberg said. “I don’t believe the prosecution proved anything beyond a reasonable doubt, but at every stage, for some reason, a court has disagreed with us.”

Adolphus Pruitt, president of the St. Louis city branch of the NAACP, said he doesn’t think “any reasonable jury” would have believed Pinkerton if all the information had been disclosed.

“We’re talking about someone’s life who’s been taken away from them by being incarcerated, their freedom taken away from them, for years — and years to come,” Pruitt said, “And so if there are any questions related to that, I think it warrants a reexamination.”

Past appeals have argued Watkins’ trial lawyer was constitutionally deficient in failing to call witnesses, including the friend he was with that night and witnesses to the shooting who would have testified that he was not present.

Late last year, the Missouri Court of Appeals ruled against Watkins in part because of a bureaucratic disagreement about whether his attorney had submitted a document correctly, as St. Louis Post-Dispatch columnist Tony Messenger wrote at the time.

Watkins’ public defender for the original trials, Brian Horneyer, declined to comment for this story, except for confirming he had no knowledge of Pinkerton’s credibility issues and that he was unaware of Pinkerton’s past.

From within the maximum security prison off of Militia Avenue in Jefferson City, on No More Victims Road, Watkins’ hope has waned.

His wife, Kelsey Watkins, took on an extra job as a nurse to help cover their attorney fees, but they’re still behind on payments.

Watkins spends upward of 20 hours a day in his concrete cell in the max-security prison, allowed to go outside for three hours per week.

He has nearly 14 years left in his sentence.

Kelsey started a dog kennel a few years ago because they thought he was about to get out on appeal and they’d run it together. They spend hours on the phone most days talking about the business, racking up around $30 per day in phone fees.

Watkins has six kids, one of whom was born a few months after he was arrested, when he was in jail.

“I missed life. I missed my kids’ life,” he said, “And I’m still missing it.”