Ramsey County Law Library Blog

The Law Librarian would be amiss in not shining some light on St. Paul attorney Deborah Ellis, who was visible in last week’s legal news for leading a legal team whose efforts brought about the overturn of the 30 year-old conviction of Louisiana death row inmate Glenn Ford. Until last week, Ford was on death row following his 1983 conviction for the murder of Isadore Rozeman. Ford always maintained his innocence, and recently discovered evidence finally showed that Ford was not in the place prosecutors previously convinced jurors he was on the night Rozeman was murdered. This fresh evidence culminated in Caddo Parrish District prosecutors requesting that the court set aside Ford’s first-degree murder conviction and death sentence, which it did. Besides these news sources, also see this blog entry from the Innocence Project.

Minnesota abolished its own death penalty in 1911, but its brief run was detailed, diverse, and divisive. There was the 1860 hanging of Ann Bilansky following her conviction for poisoning her husband to death. (Governor Ramsey expressed grave doubts as to her guilt but ultimately allowed the execution to carry out as planned.) Then there was the mass hanging at Mankato of 38 Dakota men for what authorities believed was role in the 1862 Dakota uprising. (Granted, this was a federal and not a state-ordered execution.) The swan’s song probably started to play with the 1906 execution of William Williams, whose murder of Johnny Keller and his mother was supposedly motivated by a gay love affair gone bad. His hanging was botched by miscalculation of rope length, which allowed his live body to forcibly hit the floor when the trap door was released. The rope had to be pulled up and held for over fourteen minutes before Williams was pronounced dead. Word of these technical difficulties leaked to the newspapers, and public outrage predictably followed. The Williams debacle was Minnesota’s last execution before the death penalty was finally abolished in 1911. These and other details are presented in Legacy of Violence: Lynch Mobs and Executions in Minnesota (University of Minnesota Press, 2003) by former Minneapolis Attorney John D. Bessler, now an associate professor at the University of Baltimore School of Law.

It will be interesting to see if the Louisiana Legislature does anything with their own death penalty statute following the highly-publicized justice debacle of Glenn Ford.

Most likely we will see the Minnesota  State Legislature change the statute criminalizing nonpayment of child support this session, following a recent opinion from the Minnesota Supreme Court.  In the case of State v. Nelson (A12-0071), the defendant owed $83,470 for 11 years of child support for his two children.  He was charged under Minnesota Statute 609.375, which criminalizes a parent’s failure to provide “care and support” to their children. After an extensive examination of the language of the statute, the high court concluded that the words “care” and “support” referred to separate obligations, and ruled in a 4-3 decision that Nelson could not be punished because there is no proof he didn’t otherwise “care” for them. So at least according to the dissenting opinion, Minnesota thus becomes the only state that does not hold deadbeat parents criminally accountable for unpaid child support (at least until the language of this law can be reworded).

This case opens the door to wider discussion of what legal obligations parents have toward their children.  The Minnesota Child Support Guidelines contain provisions for a “parenting time deduction” in monies owed, but would Mr. Nelson have found himself dragged into court had he simply kept up on those 11 years of checks and had otherwise ignored his children?  Understandably, the State has a legitimate interest in ensuring that noncustodial parents make timely and consistent child support payments. And any noncustodial parent who cannot afford their monetary child support obligations would be wise to get their support order changed rather than risk subjecting themselves to criminal charges, garnishments, or just a massive debt pile-up.  (This change can be done with assistance from the Ramsey County Family Court Self-Help Center.)  But has the law typically regarded non-custodial parents (which tend to be fathers) as mere checkbooks in their children’s lives?  Consider also that the child support statute (Minn. Stat. 518A) allows the state to suspend drivers’ and occupational licenses of noncustodial parents in arrears, which impacts a person’s employment prospects which are key to the financial support their kids (not to mention their ability to “care” for them in the form of driving them places).  A provocative blog entry on this subject appeared on the website of the National Parents Organization.

 Expect the Legislature to grapple with these ideas in the months ahead, and the wording of the statute to change.  Meanwhile, feel free to visit the Minnesota Child Support Guidelines website to see how the system operates.

 The Minnesota Sex Offender Program (MSOP) is currently the hot topic in Minnesota legal news.  The case of Karsjens v. Jesson  (No. 11-3659, 2014 WL  667971) was recently brought in the U.S. District Court by fourteen plaintiffs currently held in the program.  MSOP participants (or detainees?) are convicted sex offenders who have completed their sentences, but have been civilly committed into the program.  A core tenant of the program is the “treatment” component, which is purportedly the key to restoring the participants’ freedom and reintegrating them back into society.  The Karsjens plaintiffs claim that the treatment and the program itself are simply a cover for a “throw away the key” policy aimed at sex offenders. And since the program started in 1993, only one out of nearly 700 sex offenders has been discharged.  Their lawsuit alleges that being civilly committed to the treatment program is equivalent to a lifetime of prison-esque incarceration.

The legitimate desire to protect the public by confining convicted sex offenders is completely understandable, but also raises fair constitutional questions about the legitimacy of confining individuals when they are no longer under the jurisdiction of the penal system.  This constitutional conundrum is aptly explained in this Star Tribune editorial.  And obviously, reforming a program to allow for at least the potential release of convicted sex offenders bears an unmistakable political toxicity that makes legislators loath to touch it.  Nonetheless, in his Order declining to dismiss the case, Judge Donovan Frank has cued the Minnesota Legislature to not only touch but to repair this clearly broken system, lest the Court be forced to intervene. (2014 WL  667971 at  19)

 An interesting book that looks at the policy issue of treating/containing sex offenders is Failure to Protect:  America’s Sexual Predator Laws and the Rise of the Preventive State (Cornell University Press) by Eric S. Janus.  The author, currently the Dean of William Mitchell College of Law, makes several assertions, including that we spend much money for the punitive containment of sex offenders in reaction to horrific headliner incidents and tend to ignore workable (and less expensive) treatment options for more mundane sex offenders.

A Kansas legislator wants to give teachers and caregivers greater leeway in the physical discipline of children. Current Kansas law allows spanking without leaving marks, but her proposed bill would allow up to 10 strikes of the hand and smacks hard enough to leave redness and bruising. Unsurprisingly, the very idea of physically inflicting red marks on a child has some folks…well, seeing red.    This proposed bill would allow for such punishment of an 18-year old that is still in high school.  (So theoretically, Little Johnny could vote in next fall’s midterm elections, but still get a whoopin’ at school the next day.)  The bill would also allow a parent or caregiver to give authority to school personnel to apply corporate punishment to their child.  (An interesting predicament for a teacher, if some of the kids in the class could be spanked and some could not.)  It isn’t looking like this bill will go far, but it has certainly generated talk and controversy. 

The United States Supreme Court ruled in Ingraham v. Wright 430 U.S. (651 (1977) that the Eight Amendment prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment did not apply to corporal punishment in schools, and that this was an area of state authority.  Kansas is thus an exception to the 31 states that do not allow corporal punishment in schools.  A child abuse expert at a nearby hospital stated that spanking is not only less effective than other disciplinary tactics, but is psychologically damaging as well.  To the contrary there is always a choir of comments from those insisting they were spanked as a child and turned out “just fine.”  (Of course, whether or not someone is “just fine” is a subjective question and beyond the scope of this blog.)  Much more information can be found about this subject here.

Minnesota does not allow corporal punishment in schools, but local experts of both Minneapolis and St. Paul public schools suggest that the education system need better structure and/or discipline tactics than those currently employed.  See the Minnesota Department of Education for specific information regarding discipline in Minnesota schools.

In a recent workers compensation slip-and-fall case, the Minnesota Supreme Court held in Dykhoff v. Xcel Energy, et al. that the plaintiff failed to prove a causal connection between her employment and the injury sustained.  In said case, the plaintiff-employee was required to attend training at the Xcel office for which she was instructed to wear dress clothes.  On training day she was wearing 2-inch wooden heels as part of her dress ensemble when she fell on a terrazzo floor and dislocated her knee.  Referring to Minnesota Statute sec. 176.021, the Court held that an employee must show that the job put her at increased risk of injury than what she would face in everyday life.  Here, there was no evidence that the floor this plaintiff encountered was more hazardous than one she would have encountered outside of her job.  The matter of the plaintiff’s shoes came up in oral argument, which had previously been found by the worker’s compensation judge to be a plausible explanation for the fall.  In his dissent, Justice Page stated that the majority ruling contradicted established precedent and standards of fairness, and speculated that “the court deems Dykhoff an undeserving plaintiff because she wore shoes with two-inch heels…”  This case garmered much attention in the January 6 edition of the Minnesota Lawyer, because the Court arguably nixed the previous “positional risk test” and the work-connection balancing test from Bohlin v. St. Louis County et al. , a 2000 WCCA opinion.

Beyond the workers compensation standards considered, the Dykhoff case is not the first time the Minnesota Supreme Court (re)considered a plaintiff’s footwear as possible proximate causation to a plaintiff’s injuries.  In an interesting case from 1968, the Court looked at shoes, fashion, and the design of an entryway mat meant to contend with heavy winter-sloppy shoe traffic before reversing a judgment against defendant bank building at the expense of the high-heel wearing plaintiff who worked in the department store within.   Do cases like these leave a person wearing shoes with 2-inch heels (and far beyond) on wobbly ground for potential causes of action?  How standard or mandatory have high heels become for female dress apparel (especially where a wearer’s job might be concerned)?  Probably standard enough that no one is surprised to see modern remedies developed to help wearers contend with the pain and dangers of high heels, including topical anesthetics and adhesives.   Must high-heel wearers contend with weaker legal footing as well?