On the evening of November 23, 2012, a dispute over loud music in Jacksonville, Florida, lasted only a few minutes and ended with a teenager dead. Michael David Dunn, a 45-year-old software developer from Satellite Beach in Brevard County, was in the city with his fiancée for a wedding. Jordan, a teenager from Marietta, Georgia, was sitting in the back of a vehicle with three friends. Dunn asked the boys to turn the music down. Words were exchanged, and within moments the teenager was dying and Dunn was leaving.
Dunn never denied that he caused the death. His case rested entirely on why. He told investigators, and later two juries, that he had believed his life was in danger and had acted in self-defense. Nothing in or around the vehicle supported his account, and the three surviving teenagers testified that no threat had been made. A first jury, in February 2014, convicted him of three counts of attempted second-degree murder but could not agree on the murder count. A second jury, in October 2014, needed about five and a half hours to convict him of first-degree murder. He was sentenced to life in prison without parole plus 90 years, and every court that has since reviewed the case has left the convictions in place.
Dunn was white and the four teenagers were Black. The case drew national attention, and Florida's law of self-defense sat at the center of both trials.
Dunn lived on the Atlantic coast in Satellite Beach, about 175 miles south of Jacksonville. He had worked as a software developer. When he went north in late November 2012 he and his fiancée were attending a wedding reception in Jacksonville and staying in the city overnight.
Before that weekend he had no record of violence. The case against him turned on a few minutes of his life, not on his past.
The First District Court of Appeal, in its 2016 opinion, set out the facts the jury could have accepted, and they form the clearest account of the evening. Dunn and his fiancée made a stop on the way back from the reception. At about the same moment, a vehicle carrying four teenagers pulled in beside them, with the victim in the back seat. Dunn parked alongside them and heard loud music coming from their vehicle. He made a disparaging remark about the music to his fiancée, who then went inside.
While she was inside, Dunn asked the teenagers to turn the music down. The front-seat passenger turned it down. He then turned it back up at the victim's direction. A customer walking out heard Dunn say, "You're not going to talk to me that way." The customer heard no reply from the teenagers' vehicle. The three surviving passengers testified that they did not hear or see their friend threaten Dunn in any way. None of them described him getting out of the vehicle toward Dunn.
Dunn then caused the victim's death. None of the other three teenagers was hurt. Dunn's fiancée came back to the car, and the two of them left. Dunn did not call the police. He learned from a television news report that night that the teenager had died. The next morning he went home to Brevard County.
The Jacksonville Sheriff's Office identified Dunn, and on Saturday, November 24, 2012, he was taken into custody in Brevard County. He told detectives in a recorded interview that day that he had felt threatened and that he believed he had seen something deadly in the teenagers' vehicle. Investigators found nothing in the vehicle to support that belief.
On Monday, November 26, Dunn made his first court appearance in Brevard County and pleaded not guilty to murder. He was returned to Jacksonville and held there without bail.
The State Attorney's Office in Jacksonville took the case to a grand jury. In mid-December 2012 the grand jury indicted Dunn on five counts: first-degree murder, for the death of the teenager; three counts of attempted first-degree murder, one for each of the other three teenagers in the vehicle; and one further count under section 790.19 of the Florida Statutes. Prosecutors announced that they would not seek the death penalty. On December 17, 2012, Dunn appeared in court in Jacksonville and pleaded not guilty to the indictment.
The case was assigned to a judge of the Circuit Court for Duval County, and it came to trial fourteen months after the killing. Jury selection began on February 3, 2014. The panel that was seated included four white men, four white women, two Black women, an Asian woman and a Hispanic man.
The prosecution's case was built on the people who had been there. The three surviving teenagers described the argument and denied that any of them had threatened Dunn. The customer described what he had heard. Dunn's fiancée testified that in the hours after they left, and on the way back to Brevard County, Dunn never told her he had seen any threat in the teenagers' vehicle. Prosecutors played the video of Dunn's interview with detectives, in which they challenged his account and he could not explain why he had not called the police.
Dunn testified in his own defense for about four hours. He said the music was a booming bass that the boys turned down and then back up, that he heard profanity aimed at him, and that one of the teenagers threatened to kill him. He said he believed he saw a deadly threat in the back of the vehicle, that one of the boys began to get out, and that he acted in fear for his life. He said he left because he was afraid the teenagers would follow, and that he did not call the police because his attention was on his fiancée. He said that the next morning he took advice from a neighbor who worked in law enforcement about turning himself in, and that he had meant to go to his own county's sheriff.
Under cross-examination the lead trial prosecutor pressed him on the gaps in that account: that his fiancée had never heard any of it, and that he had once told detectives the object he saw might have been a stick. Dunn answered that the situation had been a clear and present danger and that he had been threatened, not disrespected. The defense rested on February 11, 2014.
The jury deliberated over four days. On February 15, 2014, it returned verdicts on four of the five counts. It found Dunn guilty of three counts of attempted second-degree murder, a lesser offense than the attempted first-degree murder charged in the indictment, and guilty of the count under section 790.19. On the first count, the murder charge, the jurors could not agree. The judge declared a mistrial on that count, citing the jury's "inability to reach a verdict as to count one." The State Attorney's Office said the same day that it would try Dunn again on the murder charge. His sentencing on the four convictions was set for March 24, 2014, and was later postponed until the retrial was over.
The second trial dealt with the murder count alone. By then Dunn had a court-appointed defense lawyer; his first-trial lawyer was no longer on the case. Jury selection began on Monday, September 22, 2014, when more than 100 prospective jurors reported to the Duval County Courthouse. Forty were excused on the first day. The judge barred television cameras from the courtroom during selection, though reporters could watch. He expected that every juror would have heard about the case and said he was prepared to sequester the panel. The defense asked for the trial to be moved out of Jacksonville; the judge allowed selection to go ahead while keeping that motion open, and later denied it.
The jury was seated within three days. It was made up of eight men and four women: seven white men, three white women, one Black man and one Black woman. Opening statements began on Thursday, September 25.
The prosecution called many of the same witnesses as before: the three surviving teenagers, employees of the business, police officers and the deputy medical examiner, whose testimony about the victim's position in the back seat became one of the defense's later grounds of appeal. The surviving teenagers testified that Dunn had been angry when he asked them to lower the music.
On Tuesday, September 30, the fifth day of testimony, Dunn took the stand again. He repeated the account he had given in February: the music, the argument, a threat from the back seat, his fear for his life. He said that he had not known anyone was hurt. This time his testimony and cross-examination together lasted just under two hours, about half the time he had spent on the stand in February. He became emotional once. He did not apologize.
The lead trial prosecutor asked him whether he had rolled down his window because he felt the teenager was disrespecting him. "No, that's not true," Dunn answered. The prosecutor pressed him on how his account had shifted over time and on why he had never called 911.
The state then recalled Dunn's former fiancée, who again testified that he never mentioned any threat to her between leaving and their return to Satellite Beach. Under questioning by the defense she agreed that she had forgotten some details of their conversations; the prosecution then had her agree that this was not a detail she would have forgotten. A Jacksonville Sheriff's Office detective was recalled as a rebuttal witness, and prosecutors replayed parts of the recorded interview from the day after the killing, pointing to inconsistencies with what Dunn had told the jury. After Dunn testified, the defense renewed its motion for a judgment of acquittal. The judge denied it.
Closing arguments were heard the same day. The state argued that the killing was premeditated and that the danger Dunn described had been perceived, not real; the defense argued that he had acted in self-defense, in the reasonable belief that he faced a deadly threat.
The jury was instructed on the morning of Wednesday, October 1, 2014. It deliberated for about five and a half hours and found Dunn guilty of first-degree murder. The retrial had lasted six days. Dunn showed no immediate reaction.
Because the state had not sought the death penalty, a conviction for first-degree murder in Florida carried one sentence: life in prison without parole. What remained to be decided were the terms on the four February convictions.
Before sentencing, Dunn's lawyer filed a motion for a new trial. It challenged several of the judge's rulings at the retrial: that the trial should have been moved out of Duval County, that the deputy medical examiner's trajectory testimony should not have been allowed, and that a juror had been dismissed without evidence of misconduct. At the sentencing hearing on Friday, October 17, 2014, the judge denied the motion before the victim impact statements were heard.
Dunn then spoke for about 25 seconds. It was his first public apology. He said he regretted what had happened, that he was sorry for the family's loss, and that he would roll back time if he could. He said he had been in fear for his life and had done what he thought he had to do, but that he was "mortified I took a life, whether it was justified or not." His lawyer told the court that by then Dunn had spent 692 days in jail.
The judge imposed life imprisonment without the possibility of parole for the murder. On each of the three counts of attempted second-degree murder he imposed 30 years, the three terms to run consecutively, for 90 years. On the count under section 790.19 he imposed 15 years, to run concurrently. The total sentence was life plus 90 years.
Within a week Dunn had been moved from county custody in Jacksonville into the Florida Department of Corrections.
Dunn filed his notice of appeal on October 23, 2014, challenging both the February 2014 verdicts and the October 2014 murder conviction. The appeal went to the First District Court of Appeal in Tallahassee, with an appellate lawyer appointed as a special assistant public defender. After several extensions, his initial brief was filed on August 11, 2015.
A three-judge panel heard oral argument on June 7, 2016. Dunn's lawyer argued that he had acted in self-defense and that the court should order an acquittal on the murder count. An assistant attorney general argued for the state that the conviction should stand and that nothing in the teenagers' vehicle had corroborated Dunn's account.
The court ruled on November 17, 2016, in case 1D14-4924. The panel affirmed all of the convictions in a six-page opinion issued per curiam, with all three judges concurring. It wrote only on one issue, the denial of Dunn's motion for judgment of acquittal on the ground that the state had failed to rebut his claim of self-defense.
The opinion set out the governing rules. The state bears the burden of proving beyond a reasonable doubt that a defendant did not act in self-defense. Once a defendant makes a prima facie showing of self-defense, the state must overcome it, either in rebuttal or by inference from its own case. Where self-defense is raised and the facts are disputed, an appellate court must defer to the jury.
Applying those rules, the court held that "the disputed facts created a jury question as to Dunn's claim of self-defense." The nature of the exchange between the two, whether the teenager had anything that could have threatened Dunn, and whether he had come out of the vehicle toward Dunn were all contested. Against Dunn's account stood the customer who heard Dunn's words and no reply, the passengers who said their friend never left the vehicle, and testimony that there was nothing in the vehicle at all. The deputy medical examiner's evidence, the court noted, was inconsistent with the victim having been outside the vehicle. The court concluded that "the State presented sufficient evidence inconsistent with Dunn's self-defense theory," and that the trial court had properly found that the state rebutted his prima facie case.
In a footnote, the panel added that the stricter test for wholly circumstantial cases did not apply, because the state had presented direct evidence from which the jury could find that Dunn had not acted in self-defense. Even under that test, it said, it would still have affirmed.
Dunn then turned to postconviction relief. He filed a motion in the circuit court raising eleven claims, among them that his trial lawyers had given him ineffective assistance. The circuit court denied the motion without a hearing, and Dunn appealed.
On September 9, 2019, a different three-judge panel of the First District Court of Appeal rejected all eleven claims in a seven-page ruling. One of the claims was that his lawyer should have hired an expert to examine the audio track of the business's security video, on the theory that a sound heard two or three seconds before Dunn acted might have come from some other, unknown source. The court disagreed. An accident reconstruction expert had already examined the sounds on the recording, it noted, and had said nothing about any such thing. "Dunn's claim is refuted by the record," the court wrote, and it called his theory "mere speculation."
Acting without a lawyer, Dunn filed a notice with the Florida Supreme Court in the week of December 9, 2019, the first step in asking that court to take up his case. On June 22, 2020, the Florida Supreme Court declined to hear it. As is usual when it refuses review, it gave no reasons. That order closed the case in the state courts.
When the Florida Supreme Court refused to hear his case in June 2020, Michael Dunn was serving his sentence of life without parole, plus 90 years, in the Florida state prison system. No later ruling in the case has been reported.
Dunn's account of a threat from the back seat was never corroborated. Nothing was found in or near the teenagers' vehicle, the surviving teenagers denied that any threat was made, and the customer who heard the exchange heard Dunn speak and no one answer. Two juries and the appellate court treated the question as one of credibility, and the second jury and the appellate court resolved it against him. It remains his version, and only his.
In December 2012 the defense said it expected the evidence to show that the teenagers' vehicle had left and come back, which it argued would undercut their accounts. At the retrial the prosecution relied on the same movement for the opposite purpose: the teenagers had returned and waited for the police, which the state argued showed their innocence.
Dunn's 2019 theory that a sound on the security audio might have come from another source was rejected by the appellate court as refuted by the record and as mere speculation.
Reports of the sentence differed on the added terms: the court's count-by-count terms, as reported locally, came to 90 years beyond the life sentence, while one national report gave 60.
Dunn was not charged with any hate crime.
November 23, 2012: Michael Dunn causes the teenager's death in Jacksonville after a dispute over loud music; three other teenagers in the same vehicle are unhurt.
November 24, 2012: Dunn is taken into custody in Brevard County.
November 26, 2012: At his first appearance, in Brevard County, he pleads not guilty to murder.
December 2012: A Duval County grand jury indicts him for first-degree murder, three counts of attempted first-degree murder and one count under section 790.19; prosecutors say they will not seek death.
December 17, 2012: Dunn pleads not guilty to the indictment in Jacksonville.
February 3, 2014: Jury selection begins in the first trial.
February 11, 2014: Dunn testifies in his own defense; the defense rests.
February 15, 2014: The jury convicts him of three counts of attempted second-degree murder and the count under section 790.19; a mistrial is declared on the murder count.
September 22, 2014: Jury selection begins in the retrial.
September 25, 2014: Opening statements in the retrial.
September 30, 2014: Dunn testifies again; closing arguments are heard.
October 1, 2014: After about five and a half hours of deliberation, the jury convicts him of first-degree murder.
October 17, 2014: The motion for a new trial is denied; Dunn is sentenced to life without parole plus 90 years.
October 23, 2014: Notice of appeal filed.
June 7, 2016: Oral argument before the First District Court of Appeal.
November 17, 2016: The First District Court of Appeal affirms the convictions (1D14-4924).
September 9, 2019: The First District Court of Appeal affirms the denial of his eleven postconviction claims.
December 2019: Dunn files a notice seeking review in the Florida Supreme Court.
June 22, 2020: The Florida Supreme Court declines to hear the case.