Minnesota Supreme Court sides with police, prosecutors in three rulings this week

When is it OK for a cop to deploy a drug-sniffing dog? Is a gun locked in a car’s glove compartment within a driver’s reach? What does it mean for a criminal to have “previously committed” a crime?

The Minnesota Supreme Court last week issued three opinions that focused on criminal justice and, in every case, sided with police and prosecutors over Minnesotans fighting criminal convictions, alleging they had been deprived of their rights.

Coming less than a month after the state’s high court ruled a person cannot brandish a deadly weapon when under attack if they can reasonably retreat, the opinions continued to show how the justices view matters of crime and punishment in Minnesota.

Justice Theodora Gaïtas took no part in any of the decisions as she was not yet appointed to the court.

On a summer night in 2021, Minnesota state trooper Jacob Bredsten pulled into a truck stop near the community of Hasty about 50 miles northwest of Minneapolis. There was a gas station and restaurant attached, and police knew it was an area for drug trafficking.

Bredsten saw a car with two adults sitting in the front seats. It was parked away from the gas pumps, which was enough to stir his suspicions. The trooper learned the car was registered to a home 130 miles away and the owner was significantly older than the pair in the car.

The driver was Jeron Garding of Moose Lake. Bredsten watched as he began extensively cleaning the car including “difficult-to-reach areas.” Bredsten said such cleaning was often done by people who had drugs in their car when they saw a police officer watching them.

The car’s passenger got out and went into the gas station. Bredsten approached the car as Garding put a large plastic bag in the trunk. When Bredsten asked if everything was OK, Garding said everything was fine and went into the gas station, too. A little while later, the passenger emerged.

Bredsten noticed that she had “recently scabbed pick marks around her mouth, bruising on her leg and arms consistent with intravenous drug use, and decaying teeth.” The passenger said the marks were from a habit she had since childhood. As the woman and trooper spoke, Bredsten noticed a tied, white plastic bag in the car’s back seat. It looked as if it had “rocks on the inside,” which was common for a large amount of methamphetamine. Despite his suspicions, he later said in court that he was uncertain about the bag’s contents.

He said he saw Garding watching him from inside the gas station. When Bredsten went into the building, the employees told him Garding had left and walked toward nearby woods. Bredsten said he viewed that as suspicious behavior.

After considering all that had happened, Bredsten had his drug dog sniff the exterior of the car. When the dog indicated drugs were inside, the trooper had it check the interior. Nearly a pound of methamphetamine was found.

Garding was convicted in Wright County District Court of first-degree drug possession with intent to sell and sentenced to eight years in prison. But he argued that evidence in his case should have been suppressed because a drug-sniffing dog was used without probable cause.

An appeals court agreed, ruling that each piece of evidence that Bredsten used to justify the use of the dog was weak. The court ruled that all of the evidence when considered together still was not enough to justify letting the dog sniff the exterior of the car.

The state Supreme Court reversed that decision.

“The use of a trained narcotics-detection dog to sniff the exterior of a motor vehicle is not a ‘search’ requiring probable cause under either the Fourth Amendment or the Minnesota Constitution,” Justice Anne McKeig wrote in the court’s opinion.

McKeig said reasonable suspicion was central to determining if the trooper had acted in accordance with the law. She wrote that “reasonable suspicion is analyzed from the point of view of an objective police officer and in light of the totality of the circumstances.”

The state argued that three key observations created reasonable suspicion: the passenger’s physical appearance with pick marks around her mouth, the plastic bag in the back seat and Garding’s flight into the woods.

The court agreed, writing that even if individual elements of suspicion were weak, Bredsten had sufficient suspicions from the totality of evidence. It said that even if someone simply appears to have used drugs in the past — as was the case with the passenger — that appearance can be incorporated to build reasonable suspicion to deploy a drug-sniffing dog.

Along with Gaïtas, Justice Sarah Hennesy did not take part in the ruling.

Brandon Moore of Waite Park, Minn., was driving a Chevy Impala through Granite Falls in January 2022 when city police officer Kyler Jelen noticed his license plate tabs were expired. Jelen activated his emergency lights, but Moore kept driving.

After about 3 miles, with Jelen and his partner Brandon Grimsley in pursuit, Moore pulled over. But he refused to get out of the car. Jelen called for backup.

Moore told the officers that they had no reason to stop him and spoke passionately about the Constitution. He was arrested.

Officers searched the car and found a pound of methamphetamine, $3,400 in the center console and a 9-millimeter handgun in the glove box. A round was in the weapon’s chamber. That gun meant Moore could be charged with aggravated first-degree drug sale in Chippewa County. A district court jury found him guilty, and Moore was sentenced to eight years in prison.

Prosecutors said at his trial that Moore had a firearm “within immediate reach” when he was pulled over.

Moore appealed. He said that because the glove compartment was locked and the key was on a key ring in the ignition, the gun was not within immediate reach. Therefore, he said, he couldn’t instantly access it.

The appeals court disagreed. It ruled that the state has to prove only that “a firearm is accessible by touching because the defendant’s access is ‘without delay’ and ‘close at hand.’”

The Supreme Court was asked to review several issues of the case but agreed to consider only what “within immediate reach” means. The justices sided with the district and appeals courts.

“The crux of the parties’ dispute is whether the phrase ‘within immediate reach’ requires that a firearm be instantly accessible upon reaching out,” Justice Karl Procaccini wrote the court’s opinion.

The phrase “within immediate reach” is not defined in Minnesota’s criminal code, so the court looked to dictionary definitions and applied them to the criminal statute of the case, which asks whether Moore possessed or sold drugs while “also possessing a readily accessible firearm.”

Procaccini wrote that if the Supreme Court were to change the definition of “within immediate reach” to mean “instantly accessible,” as Moore asks in his appeal, it would create a “bright-line rule that a firearm in any sort of locked container cannot, as a matter of law, be ‘within immediate reach.’”

The state presented several scenarios where this bright-line rule could create legal confusion. For instance, is a gun instantly accessible on top of a backpack vs. at the bottom of a backpack? Could criminals simply lock a gun case before being arrested so that the weapon would be viewed as not within immediate reach?

The court rejected these concepts and said that strictly on evidence the jury correctly found Moore guilty because he was seated in the driver’s seat and had access to the key to the glove compartment.

“Although the State did not present evidence as to precisely how long those actions would take, such a determination is well within a jury’s common understanding,” Procaccini wrote.

In the seven years between when Korwin Balsley of St. Cloud sexually assaulted his girlfriend’s 9-year-old daughter in 2015 and when he was sentenced for the crime in 2022, he was convicted of second-degree assault for another attack in 2017.

That timeline raised a question: When exactly is a crime “previously committed”?

In 2015, Balsley had his girlfriend and her daughter over to stay at his farmhouse in Morgan, Minn. While the child lay on a mattress upstairs, Balsley molested her. He told the girl not to say anything. But in 2021, she told her father, who told the girl’s counselor, who reported the matter to police.

In 2017, Balsley was convicted of felony second-degree assault and sentenced to three years in prison for robbing an acquaintance in Redwood Falls, Minn., and later pointing a shotgun in the victim’s face when he tried to get his property back.

In 2022, Balsley was convicted on two counts of second-degree sexual assault for molesting the 9-year-old girl at his farmhouse. At his sentencing, a Redwood County District Court judge ruled that the 2017 conviction meant that Balsley was an “engrained offender.” That meant the judge could give him an upward departure from Minnesota sentencing guidelines. Balsley was given nearly 21 years in prison. Without the engrained offender status, he likely would have been sentenced to nearly 10 years.

In an appeal, Balsley questioned how the robbery could be ruled a previously committed crime when he was being sentenced for a sexual assault that occurred two years earlier.

An appeals court ruled that the language of Minnesota’s legal statutes for engrained offenders clearly shows that “previously committed” means a predatory crime was committed before the sentencing for the current crime, not before the current crime took place.

The Supreme Court agreed with McKeig writing the opinion.

The justice highlighted language in the statute that says when giving an upward departure at sentencing because of a “previously committed” crime, the court must make a “determination that the offender is a danger to public safety.”

The high court ruled that the statute does not clearly indicate if “previously committed” means the crime was committed before sentencing or before the current crime under consideration, but the language “that the offender is a danger to public safety” is clearly in the present tense.

“Therefore, whether the offender was a danger to public safety before the commission of the offense for which they are being sentenced is irrelevant,” McKeig wrote.