McInnis

INTRODUCTION

In 1994, Karl Senser was fatally stabbed five times in the chest. Law enforcement amassed very strong circumstantial evidence that Leon Daniel McInnis and his friend, Steven Thomas, together, murdered Senser during a carjacking, kidnapping, and robbery. Although the People successfully prosecuted Thomas in 1996, they did not believe they had enough evidence, then, to successfully convict McInnis of murder. In 2018, the People decided to take a fresh look at the case in search of Thomas’s accomplice. They conducted DNA testing for the first time on items that had been collected during the original investigation, and they found McInnis’s DNA on a napkin that had been wrapped around a knife left at the crime scene and on the front passenger seat cover inside Senser’s car. They conducted further testing, in part to exclude other suspects, including a man Thomas originally told police had stabbed Senser. Based on this new evidence, the People charged McInnis with Senser’s murder in 2021, 27 years after he was killed. In 2023, McInnis filed a motion to dismiss the murder case on state due process grounds. He asserted the People were negligent in delaying prosecution for so…