Plain English
Words these pages use because the courts use them. Two courts convicted him, a state court and a federal one, and a few words belong to only one of them.
The courts
- Hennepin County District Court
- The state trial court for Minneapolis and the county around it. Judge Peter Cahill tried the case there. A different judge, Paul Scoggin, has heard his petitions since.
- Minnesota Court of Appeals
- The state court that hears appeals from trial courts. Three of its judges decide each case.
- Minnesota Supreme Court
- The state’s highest court. It chooses which appeals to hear, and it turned down his.
- Federal court
- The United States’ own courts, separate from the state’s. The federal case was in the U.S. District Court in St. Paul, before Judge Paul Magnuson.
- Attorney General
- Minnesota’s chief lawyer, elected statewide. Keith Ellison’s office took over the prosecution from the county prosecutor in May 2020.
- Two prosecutions
- A state and the federal government count as separate governments, so each can prosecute the same act under its own laws. That isn’t double jeopardy.
The paperwork
- Complaint
- The document that starts a criminal case in Minnesota. It lists the charges and the facts the prosecutor says support them. An amended complaint replaces it.
- Grand jury
- A group of citizens who hear the prosecutor’s evidence in private and decide whether to charge someone. Minnesota only requires one for crimes that carry life in prison, like first-degree murder, so this case started with a complaint instead.
- Indictment
- A charge brought by a grand jury. The federal case started with one.
- Information
- A charge a prosecutor files without a grand jury. In federal court that takes the defendant’s consent, which he gave for the 2017 count.
- Docket
- The court’s numbered list of everything filed in a case. Entry 42 is the forty-second thing filed.
- Plea agreement
- A written deal between a defendant and the prosecutors. He pleads guilty to some charges, and they agree on others to drop and on a range of sentence.
- Broadcast transcript
- A word-for-word record. The court reporter’s transcript of this trial was never posted, so these pages quote transcripts typed from the court’s own video feed and cite them by its clock.
The charges
- Second-degree unintentional murder
- Causing a death, without meaning to, while committing a felony. Here the felony was third-degree assault. This is the one count he was convicted and sentenced on.
- Third-degree assault
- Intentionally using unlawful force on someone, without their consent, that causes substantial bodily harm. He only had to mean to use the force, not to cause that much harm.
- Third-degree murder
- Causing a death by an act “eminently dangerous” to others, done with “a depraved mind,” without meaning to kill. Also called depraved-mind murder.
- Second-degree manslaughter
- Causing a death by culpable negligence, which means consciously taking a chance of causing death or great harm that an ordinary careful person would see.
- Lesser offense
- A crime contained in a more serious one. Minnesota law allows only one conviction for the same act, so the other two guilty verdicts were never entered as convictions.
- Under color of law
- Acting with the power of a government job, like a police officer on duty. The federal civil rights law makes it a crime to use that power to take away someone’s constitutional rights.
- Aiding and abetting
- Intentionally helping someone else commit a crime. The other three officers were charged that way.
How a case moves
- Probable cause
- Enough evidence to make it reasonable to believe a person committed the crime. It’s the bar a charge has to clear to go to trial, and it’s a lot lower than proof.
- Venue
- Where a trial is held. A defendant can ask to move it if publicity would make a fair jury impossible where the crime happened.
- Continuance
- Putting a trial or a hearing off to a later date.
- Severance
- Splitting one trial of several defendants into separate trials.
- Sequester
- Keeping jurors away from news and the public, sometimes in a hotel, so nothing outside the courtroom reaches them.
- Jury selection
- Questioning possible jurors one by one to find out if they can be fair. Also called voir dire.
- Peremptory strike
- Removing a possible juror without giving a reason. Each side gets a set number. Here the judge raised his to 18 and the State’s to 10.
- Excused for cause
- Removing a possible juror for a specific reason they can’t be fair, like having already made up their mind. There’s no limit on these.
- Alternate juror
- A juror who hears the whole trial but only deliberates if one of the twelve has to leave.
- Anonymous jury
- Jurors known in court only by number, their names kept from the public until the judge releases them.
- Earlier incident
- Evidence of something that happened before the case, which a jury may only use for a narrow purpose the judge sets. Minnesota calls it Spreigl evidence.
- The Fifth
- The right not to be a witness against yourself. A defendant who uses it doesn’t testify, and the jury is told it can’t hold that against him.
- Rebuttal
- Evidence or argument that answers the other side’s. The State goes last because it has to prove the case.
- Beyond a reasonable doubt
- The level of proof needed to convict. It means proof that leaves the jury firmly convinced, not proof beyond every possible doubt.
- Unanimous
- All twelve jurors agreeing. A verdict in a criminal case has to be.
- Polling the jury
- Asking each juror out loud, one at a time, if the verdict read is theirs.
What the jury had to decide
- Substantial causal factor
- The test for causing a death. His acts didn’t have to be the only cause, only a substantial one. Other causes don’t excuse him unless one of them alone caused the death.
- Superseding cause
- Something that comes afterward and breaks the chain, so that it alone causes the death. It’s the one way another cause can clear a defendant.
- Authorized use of force
- The defense the jury was told about. No crime is committed if a police officer uses reasonable force to make a lawful arrest, and the State had to prove his force wasn’t that.
- Reasonable officer
- How force is judged. The question is what a reasonable officer in the same situation would have done at the moment the force was used, not what the officer meant or what hindsight shows.
- Prone restraint
- Holding a person face down. Police training warns it can make it hard to breathe, and says to move the person onto their side once they’re under control.
- Recovery position
- Rolling a person onto their side so they can breathe more easily. The Minneapolis police’s own training said to do it.
- Hobble
- A strap that ties a person’s legs together. The officers talked about using one and didn’t.
- Maximal restraint technique
- The Minneapolis police method of strapping a struggling person’s legs and moving them off their stomach. The defense said what the officers did began as one. The State said the knee was no part of it.
- Asphyxia
- Death from not getting enough oxygen. The State’s doctors said the restraint caused it.
- Paraganglioma
- A rare tumor that can release adrenaline. One was found at the autopsy and called incidental, meaning the medical examiner didn’t think it played a part.
The sentence
- Sentencing guidelines
- Minnesota’s chart of how long a sentence should be for each crime, set by a state commission. A judge has to stay inside its range unless there are substantial and compelling reasons not to.
- Presumptive sentence
- What the guidelines call for. For this crime and no past record it’s 150 months, inside a range of 128 to 180.
- Aggravating factor
- A fact that makes a crime worse than the usual one of its kind, like particular cruelty. It has to be proved before a judge can go past the guidelines.
- Blakely
- A 2004 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that a jury has to find the facts behind a longer sentence, unless the defendant gives that up. He gave it up, so the judge decided them.
- Upward departure
- A sentence longer than the guidelines’ range. His was 270 months against a top of 180.
- Concurrent
- Served at the same time. His state and federal sentences run together, not one after the other.
- Supervised release
- A period after a federal prison term when a person lives under conditions the court sets, checked by a probation officer.
After the verdict
- Motion for a new trial
- Asking the trial judge to throw out the verdict and start over because something went wrong. It comes before any appeal.
- Schwartz hearing
- A hearing in Minnesota where a judge questions jurors about possible misconduct after a trial. He asked for one and was refused.
- Direct appeal
- The first appeal after a conviction, which looks only at what happened at trial. His was decided in 2023.
- Petition for review
- Asking the Minnesota Supreme Court to hear a case after the Court of Appeals has ruled. It turns most of them down.
- Certiorari
- Asking the U.S. Supreme Court to hear a case. It takes very few, and turning one down decides nothing about the case itself.
- Post-conviction petition
- A way to challenge a state conviction after the appeal is over, usually with something that wasn’t in the trial record. It goes back to the trial court first.
- Knaffla rule
- Minnesota’s rule that a petition after the appeal can’t raise what was raised, or could have been raised, on appeal, with narrow exceptions.
- Structural error
- A mistake in how a case was run that’s so basic a court doesn’t ask whether it changed the result. His lawyer says the way he was charged is one.
- Motion to vacate
- The federal version of a post-conviction petition, under section 2255 of the federal code. His asks to undo his federal guilty plea.
- Ineffective assistance
- A lawyer’s work falling so far short that it denied the client a fair process. It’s the one kind of claim his plea deal let him bring later.
- Stay
- Pausing a case, or a ruling, until something else is decided.
The stamp on a ruling
- Granted
- The court said yes to the request on this card, whichever side made it.
- Granted in part
- The court gave some of what was asked for on this card and said no to the rest.
- Denied
- The court said no to the request on this card.
- Reinstated
- A charge that had been dismissed was put back, so the jury could decide it.
- Guilty
- The jury’s verdict, or his own plea in court. It becomes a conviction once the court enters judgment on it.
- Affirmed
- The court above agreed with the court below and left the conviction and the sentence as they were.
- Dismissed
- Thrown out without a ruling on whether the claims in it were right.