People we’ve helped exonerate
Charlie Dunn
Charlie Dunn spent 27 years in prison for a crime he didn’t commit. He died on January 12, 2015 — the same day he was granted parole — before he could walk out of those doors. He never got to hear the words that came seven years later: the charge against Charlie Dunn is dismissed.
Charlie Dunn spent 27 years in prison for a crime he didn’t commit. He died on January 12, 2015 — the same day he was granted parole — before he could walk out of those doors. He never got to hear the words that came seven years later: the charge against Charlie Dunn is dismissed.
In June 1987, Charlie, then 43 years old, made a late-night drive with his girlfriend Joyce Watkins to Fort Campbell, Kentucky, to pick up Joyce’s four-year-old great-niece, B.B. The child’s caretaker had been calling insistently for days. Charlie and Joyce had both worked overnight shifts and hadn’t slept. He’d even asked his two sons to come along, but they stayed behind for a high school football game. Still, they made the trip. That’s the kind of people they were.
When they returned to Nashville, something was clearly wrong with the little girl. After consulting with B.B.’s family, they waited through the night. By morning, Joyce took her to the hospital. Doctors discovered a severe brain injury and signs of sexual assault. B.B. died the following day.
The medical examiner, Dr. Gretel Harlan, concluded, based on reasoning that would later be exposed as scientifically baseless, that the injuries had occurred during the nine hours B.B. was in Charlie and Joyce’s care. That opinion became the center of the prosecution’s case. Charlie and Joyce had no criminal records. They had cooperated fully with police, given investigators access to their home, and been the ones to bring the child in for care. None of it was enough.
On August 5, 1988, a jury convicted Charlie Dunn and Joyce Watkins of first-degree murder and aggravated rape. They were sentenced to life in prison.
Charlie maintained his innocence until his death. When detectives first interviewed him, he told them plainly: “I’m going to tell you something — you all can question Joyce all you want and you can question me. You ain’t going to find no wrong in either one of us, because we are both good people.”
He was right. The system just took too long to catch up.
Charlie Dunn was taken from his children and served 27 years for a crime he did not commit. He maintained his innocence the entire time. It is heartbreaking that Charlie passed away in prison before he was fully exonerated, but we are grateful that his children, and the entire world, now knows that Charlie was telling the truth all along.
Jason Gichner Executive Director, TIP
Building the case for innocence
When Joyce Watkins came to the Tennessee Innocence Project in 2020, she didn’t just ask them to review her own case. She insisted that Charlie be represented too — so that his name could be cleared for his children.
What TIP found was a conviction built on a crumbling foundation. Dr. Harlan’s central argument on the timing of the injury had no basis in forensic science. TIP brought the case to the Davidson County District Attorney’s Conviction Review Unit (CRU). The CRU conducted an independent investigation and uncovered additional evidence of innocence..
TIP retained two independent medical experts: Dr. Adele Lewis, Chief Medical Examiner for the State of Tennessee, and Dr. Shilpa Reddy, a Pediatric Neurologist at Monroe Carell Jr. Children’s Hospital. Both concluded that Dr. Harlan’s testimony was wrong. The injuries to the child occurred before she was ever in the care of Joyce Watkins or Charlie Dunn.
Exoneration
On November 10, 2021, TIP filed a motion to reopen the petition for post-conviction relief. Simultaneously, the DA’s office filed its own notice of intent to vacate both convictions — a unified declaration from the prosecution and defense alike that Charlie Dunn and Joyce Watkins had been convicted of crimes they did not commit.
On January 6, 2022, Judge Angelita Blackshear Dalton vacated the convictions. “The evidence presented at trial and post-conviction in this case was misleading, false, and uncorrected as to material issues,” she wrote.
On January 12, 2022 — seven years to the day after Charlie died in prison — his family was in the courtroom when Judge Blackshear Dalton dismissed the charges. She removed her mask to address them directly: “To the family of Charlie Dunn, the charge against Charlie Dunn is dismissed.”
Charlie Dunn was 70 years old when he died. He had spent more than a third of his life imprisoned for something he did not do. He did not live to see justice — but because of the work of Tennessee Innocence Project, the Davidson County DA’s Conviction Review Unit, and the determination of Joyce Watkins to make sure he wasn’t forgotten, his children know the truth.
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