Case Story: A tragic accident turned Manslaughter trial

DISCLAIMER:

CASE RESULTS DEPEND ON A VARIETY OF FACTORS UNIQUE TO EACH CASE. CASE RESULTS DO NOT GUARANTEE OR PREDICT A SIMILAR RESULT IN ANY FUTURE CASE.

“Don’t take no for an answer.”

This phrase, made famous by Winston Churchill, has come to embody resilience, persistence, and an unwillingness to accept failure.

In many contexts, it’s inspirational. But what about in other contexts — like when the police are investigating an alleged crime?

At a certain point, aren’t they obligated to take no for an answer? Especially when the answer really is no?

That’s what this case is about.

Logan, our client, was involved in a horrific and tragic accident in which a shotgun accidentally discharged, hit one of Logan’s best friends, and caused his death.

Read that sentence again.

Logan, by complete accident, shot and killed one of his closest friends. He experienced one of the most traumatic events the human mind can conceive.

But rather than understand the gravity and pain of the incident, the police refused to accept Logan’s explanation of what happened. They were convinced something more was going on.

When Logan said that wasn’t the case, the police wouldn’t take no for an answer.

So they charged Logan with murder and manslaughter. Knowing neither was true, we fought tooth and nail to prove his innocence. We were ultimately successful, but only after 18 months of consistent hard work.

Here’s how we did it.

The Shooting

Out of respect for the deceased and his family, an explanation of the shooting will be brief. Logan and his two close friends were at Logan’s house early one fall morning in 2020. While all three were in Logan’s bedroom, Logan and his friend (not the deceased) began examining some guns in the room.

The guns belonged to various members of Logan’s family. Logan showed one shotgun to the friend, put that gun down, and then began to show him another gun.

Then, suddenly and without warning, the gun went off. When it went off, it was in Logan’s hands, and it was inadvertently pointed at the deceased. The deceased, one of Logan’s best friends, was struck and killed almost instantly.

Shocked by what had just happened, the boys immediately called 911 and reported the incident. When law enforcement arrived, they separated the two and secured the room where the shooting occurred.

From the beginning, the boys insisted that what had happened was a complete and total accident. Their stories were identical. They never wavered.

And at first, the police seemed to believe them. But when they received a preliminary autopsy report that seemed to contradict the boys’ story, their tune changed.

The Charge

The provisional autopsy report claimed the deceased had died because of a “contact wound” to the head, the implication being that Logan had put the gun to his close friend’s head before it went off.

Now this radically changed the case. It no longer seemed to be an accident, and it also made the boys liars.

That is, if it was accurate. The problem was that it wasn’t.

This turned out to be the case’s ultimate decision point. The moment that changed its trajectory forever.

Because rather than trying to determine whether the report was correct, the police instead simply accepted it and used it as a blueprint going forward.

From then on, they acted 100% convinced that Logan had put a gun to his close friend’s head and pulled the trigger. And no matter how many times that view was discredited, the police simply wouldn’t take no for an answer.

When they interviewed Logan multiple times, he wouldn’t agree to their new theory. Same for when they interviewed the other boy in the room. In both instances, they browbeat actual children who had only days earlier witnessed the accidental death of their best friend.

The investigators’ callousness was laid bare when the other boy, after being repeatedly pressed to “tell the truth,” stuck with his story, saying between crying sobs: “If I told you otherwise, I’d be lying.”

Despite all this, the police refused to take no for an answer, and eventually they successfully pressured the local prosecutor into charging Logan with murder and manslaughter.

The Pretrial Fights

We quickly developed a comprehensive legal strategy to fight each of the charges against Logan. Because we knew that what had happened was an accident, we were unwilling to accept any sort of criminal responsibility.

Prosecutors aren’t used to that, so we knew we’d be in for a fight.

And that’s exactly what we got.

Our first fight was pretrial, meaning before the case got to a judge or jury. And it wasn’t just one fight, it was a long series of battles on various legal issues.

Because many were technical, we won’t discuss them all, but two deserve highlighting.

First, we prevented the state from designating Logan something called “extended jurisdiction juvenile,” or EJJ. This is when the state wants to treat someone under 18 like a quasi-adult. The reason they tried to do this is that EJJ punishments are more severe than juvenile ones.

Meaning if the state got an EJJ designation, and Logan had been found guilty at trial, he would have adult felony convictions, with possible adult prison sentences.

In short, they were trying to ratchet up the stakes even more.

We stopped them at the trial court, however, and also assisted the attorney who handled the issue at the court of appeals. In both instances, the judges rightly understood that Logan was not at all an adult, or even a quasi-adult, and so the EJJ designation was incorrect.

This was a big deal because it limited the possible punishment Logan would face if convicted.

Next, we forced the state to drop the murder charge against Logan by applying a recent Minnesota Supreme Court decision called State v. Noor to our case. Because our legal argument was sound, the state voluntarily dropped the murder charge rather than fight us.

At this point, the only remaining charge was manslaughter. And while we tried multiple times to get it dismissed, we were ultimately unsuccessful. But wars aren’t won by single battles, and we knew that each time we made a legal challenge to the manslaughter charge, we chipped away at the state’s case.

Now all that was left for the state to do was dismiss the case or try it.

Sadly, the prosecutor had adopted the mindset of the police, wouldn’t take no for an answer, and moved forward with trial.

The Trial

While we didn’t want a trial, we were ready for it.

We had prepared for months, hired multiple experts, and knew our case inside and out.

But trials are always scary things. Because with trial, it’s all-or-nothing. One side wins big, the other side loses big.

Settling a case gives something to both sides. Trial doesn’t. Trial is all-out war.

And that’s how we approached it. A team of four — including all three of the firm’s lawyers — tried the case. What was supposed to be a three-day trial lasted almost five days. Between both sides, 22 people testified.

Our defense was simple: this was a tragic accident, and everybody believed that until the inaccurate autopsy report was filed. From then on, the police got tunnel vision, turned the shooting into something it wasn’t, and wouldn’t take no for an answer.

And that’s exactly what came out at trial. Witness after witness showed how this report poisoned the case, and how things would have been different had the report not been relied on.

But it was. The damage was done.

And so at trial, after our experts proved that the provisional autopsy was inaccurate, the state was left reeling, without a good explanation for why what had happened was a crime.

A gun to someone’s head when the trigger is pulled — that’s a crime.

But a gun inadvertently going off and accidentally hitting someone — that’s not.

In the words of our founding partner and lead trial lawyer, Bruce Ringstrom, Jr., in his closing statement: “This case shows that sometimes accidents really are accidents.”

The Decision

Because Logan was charged as a juvenile, under Minnesota law he didn’t have a right to a jury trial. So the case was tried before a judge.

This makes for many differences, but one of the main ones is that the judge doesn’t rule nearly as quickly as a jury. Instead, the judge takes the case under advisement and takes her time before issuing a ruling.

Here, that was especially true.

The case was submitted to the judge on February 18th, 2022.

For an entire month, we waited.

Then, on March 18th, 2022, the judge made her decision. She found Logan not guilty of the manslaughter charge.

In her 20-page ruling, she said many powerful things.

First, she did something the police never did — she empathized with Logan. She noted that he had “experienced a traumatic incident” that left him “clearly distraught” from the “guilt and shame of having just killed one of his friends.”

Next, she took the police and the prosecutor to task for the erroneous autopsy report: “Unfortunately, from the beginning, the path of the investigation was fueled for the worse by an inaccurate Provisional Autopsy report. This Court believes that had that report not included the finding of ‘contact wound,’ the course of the lives of all involved in this matter would be different.”

Finally, she confirmed what we knew from the very beginning, that this was an accident, not a crime. “In all likelihood,” she wrote, Logan “was checking to see if the Winchester shotgun was loaded, and because of a faulty safety, it discharged. While this handling of guns in a small room with others in close proximity is definitely unsafe, and likely negligent on some level, it does not rise to the criminal definition” of manslaughter.

The judge ended her ruling with the same grace and humility she had shown throughout the case by noting the tragic sadness of the incident:

“While this Court recognizes the victim’s family’s grief, and empathizes with them, that grief cannot be softened by the criminal justice system.”

We couldn’t have said it better ourselves.