Domestic violence victim tries to start new life after murder conviction is overturned

Sabrina Dunn said she will always firmly believe she acted in self-defense and used reasonable force when she shot and killed her ex-husband, William “Bill” Dunn, after he entered her Orange County residence in October 2020.

Dunn remained steadfast in that belief even after the state charged her with murder and a jury convicted her in August 2022.

But the courts finally saw it her way after the Indiana Supreme Court overturned her conviction in April 2024 and sent her case back to Orange County, where a new jury found her not guilty in February.

Dunn, 47, is relieved she is finally free but admits that sometimes she thinks it would be better to be in prison than try to navigate some of the challenges she’s faced in the weeks since she was released.

She acknowledged to The Indiana Lawyer she’s struggling to find her footing post-acquittal, with financial obligations and the stigma of a murder conviction—even one that’s now been overturned—hanging over her head.

“I’m finding it difficult to find my place, for sure,” Dunn said, noting that some people are clearly unhappy that she’s free.

She said that while her church has been supportive, she’s also run into people on the street in Paoli who have criticized her and called her a “murderer” that got off on a technicality.

Dunn’s case has attracted attention and support from domestic violence survivor advocates, but that state has consistently argued that she laid in wait for her ex-husband and killed him according to a plan, rather than out of self-defense.

Dottie Davis, owner of a violence-prevention corporate training business, testified as an expert witness on Sabrina Dunn’s behalf.

Davis, former deputy chief of the Fort Wayne Police Department, said she had never testified as an expert witness for the defense in a criminal case prior to the Dunn case.

She noticed the high volume of calls Dunn made to various police agencies, the police reports generated by her calls, Dunn’s protective order against her ex-husband and her divorce filing.

“What happened is the victim did everything society expects,” Davis said.

Given the circumstances, Davis said Dunn used what she considered reasonable force to defend herself when her ex-husband entered her residence.

Domestic violence

In the aftermath of her case and acquittal, Dunn wants everyone to know domestic violence is a real and serious matter.

“It’s life and death,” she said.

She has lived in Orange County since she was 12 and married her ex-husband in 2005.

In October 2020, Sabrina Dunn shot her ex-husband Bill several times when he entered her home, a separate guesthouse on the couple’s property, after she told him to leave her alone. Police recovered two knives, a lockpicking kit and suspected methamphetamines. Under his body, police found a third knife.

Sabrina told police that Bill was carrying a “great big knife” during the encounter and earlier in the day had threatened to kill her and her boyfriend.

Throughout the trial, the defense argued that Sabrina justifiably used deadly force in defense of her dwelling. The prosecution argued that Sabrina planned the murder.

Sabrina Dunn said she was very upset after the first trial’s verdict.

At first, she experienced what she described as a whirlwind of emotions.

She said, with a sentence of 65 years, she had to learn to accept things and the possibility of spending her life in prison.

“I focused on my Bible. I prayed a lot. I found Jesus and honestly that’s what carried me through each and every day,” Dunn said.

An appeal to the Indiana Court of Appeals led to Dunn’s murder conviction being affirmed in 2023 by the appellate court, but her sentence was reduced to 55 years with five years suspended to probation.

In her appellant’s brief to the Indiana Court of Appeals, filed after her initial trial, Dunn described the abrupt change in her marriage that occurred when Bill Dunn began using methamphetamine in 2018.

Sabrina Dunn described it during the trial, “the more he used the more he changed, get [sic] more aggressive more short tempered, short attention span, recluse, be, withdrew himself a lot instead of interacting with us.”

She filed her first protective order request in April 2019.

According to Sabrina’s petition, on April 28, 2019, Bill Dunn:

“[W]as angry at me for staying with a friend. When I got home that morning he was standing at the door and wouldn’t let me in. I was trying to get in and he grabbed me and caused bruising on the arm.

I also hit the door facing and this causes additional bruising to my right elbow. Once I was in the house he was cussing me and calling me terrible names while my daughter was in her bedroom. After this happened, I was so tired of the bulling [sic] and the taunting that I went to stay in the guest house. I have now been locked out of the guest house. I ended up having to sleep in my car.”

The state’s appellee brief stated that, beginning in May 2019, and continuing through October 2020, Dunn and her ex-husband called the Orange County Sheriff’s Department approximately 108 times.

On the day he was killed, Bill Dunn died of multiple gunshot wounds. He suffered eight wounds — three in his chest, four in his back and one in the back of his arm. None of the wounds Dunn suffered were close contact, according to the state.

Conviction overturned

While losing at the appellate level was heartbreaking for Sabrina Dunn, another appeal to the Indiana Supreme Court led to her murder conviction being overturned.

Ultimately, the court determined that a jury instruction offered at her trial was so ambiguous that it constituted a fundamental error.

Justice Christopher Goff, writing for the state’s high court, said the trial court instructed the jury that the state bore the burden of proving beyond a reasonable doubt that Sabrina Dunn did not act in self-defense “and/or” in defense of her dwelling.

Providing that either/or option to the jury impaired the sole defense strategy Dunn pursued throughout the trial and created serious risk that she was wrongly convicted without the state disproving beyond a reasonable doubt that she acted in defense of her dwelling, the supreme court ruled.

Robert Bottorff II, Dunn’s appointed attorney for her appeal, said the court’s decision made for a good day for him and his client. “I was ecstatic,” Bottorff said. “It’s a pretty rare thing to have the Supreme Court overturn a murder conviction.”

Goff noted in his opinion that Bill Dunn’s behavior escalated in May 2020, with 911 calls and police visits becoming more frequent. The police took him to the hospital on several occasions and twice retained them under court orders deeming Bill to be “dangerous.”

The justice also pointed out that Bill Dunn was arrested once for invasion of privacy in 2019, but never again, even as the ex-husband’s unlawful contacts with Sabrina were recorded by police.

In September 2020, Sabrina Dunn commented on Facebook that if Bill tried to run her off the couple’s shared property in Paoli, he should “bring it on” and would need to “survive a shot gun.”

She secured her house with deadbolts on the inside of the door and the windows screwed shut.

Acquittal at second trial

Matt Blanton, a partner with Blanton & Pierce, LLC, was appointed to represent Dunn at her initial trial and retrial.

He said facts that were pointed out in the first trial, like the dozens of police calls Sabrina made against Bill, did not seem to register with the original jurors.

Those jurors also seemed to believe that Sabrina took Bill Dunn’s keys to lure him to the house, a belief not supported by the evidence, Blanton said.

Blanton pointed out the second trial took much longer than the initial one and provided a vastly different result.

“I thought we had a good story to tell. I thought we had more time to develop the story so it squared with people’s life experiences,” Blanton said.

The Indiana Public Defender Council also provided assistance to Sabrina Dunn’s defense.

Michael Moore, the council’s assistant executive director, said staff did a case review, provided support and technical assistance and helped connect Dunn’s court-appointed attorney with domestic violence advocates.

Moore said the council provides assistance in all kinds of cases, not just those involving domestic violence.

He said most public defenders are on their own and don’t have access to paralegals and investigators in the way that prosecutors do.

Kerry Hyatt Bennett, the Indiana Coalition Against Domestic Violence’s chief legal counsel, said she when she learned Dunn’s conviction had been overturned she reached out to provide help.

She said she knew that Davis would be a strong expert witness in Dunn’s defense.

Bennett said expert witness testimony helps explain to jurors the choices domestic violence survivors face when they’re in situations like Dunn’s.

“It humanizes the decisions the survivor has to make sometimes,” Bennett said. “Power and control is a crazy thing and it’s not always about getting beat. Sometimes it’s about having to feed yourself.”

After acquittal, what’s next for Dunn?

Bennett said she was pleasantly surprised by Dunn’s acquittal, because “it doesn’t happen as often as it should.”

She said the state supreme court’s five justices hold a better understanding of domestic violence survivor trauma than many trial court judges.

Davis said she is using Dunn’s case in her law enforcement training sessions, as it relates to potential civil liability for police agencies.

She stressed that she’s very passionate about seeing Dunn “get her justice” and that she had the right to self-defense.

Blanton noted that Dunn is still recovering from the almost three years she spent in the Orange County Jail and 18 months she was in state prison before her February acquittal.

Dunn also is facing a $1.13 million default judgment from a wrongful death lawsuit filed against her by Kayla Dunn, one of Bill Dunn’s daughters from a previous relationship.

Upon her release from prison, Sabrina Dunn said she felt lost and uncertain about what direction her life would take.

She said she doesn’t intend to stay in the Paoli area, but for now, she was nowhere else to go.

“It’s been six weeks,” she said. “ I’m still working on it. I’m still struggling to find my way.”•