Case Story: Defending a Teacher charged with Harassing a student

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.

It’s no secret that people perceive things differently. After all, if that weren’t the case, then the phrase “one man’s trash is another’s treasure” wouldn’t make much sense.

But what about when competing perceptions intersect with criminal law?

When Person A thinks one thing happened and Person B thinks another thing happened entirely. Worse, what if the thing Person A thinks happened is a crime?

That’s what this case is about. Our client, a high school teacher from northern Minnesota, was accused of inappropriate behavior with a student. He vehemently denied the allegation and hired us to defend him.

Through aggressive pretrial litigation, we successfully got the charges against him dismissed by convincing the judge that, whatever the student thought our client did, it wasn’t criminal under Minnesota law.

The Charge

At first blush, the charges against our client seemed to be of the type we’ve all seen before. You know the formula: a teacher, usually a man, gets himself in trouble by becoming too friendly with a student, usually a female.

And that’s what the state said happened here. That our client did various things to a student of his that were sexual, harassing, and unwanted.

But our client told a very different story. First, he denied the core allegations of the student. Second, he said that while a few things she claimed happened did in fact happen, they were not done out of a desire to harass or be sexual, but to help her and because they were part of his job as an educator.

Now when a situation like this arises—where both sides fundamentally disagree as to what happened in a certain situation—usually the only way to decide who is “right” and who is “wrong” is to go to trial.

That’s the essence of trial, after all: a factual dispute.

One person says one thing happened. The other disagrees. So someone else—usually a jury—listens to both sides and decides who to believe. Here, that would mean our client or his student.

We were absolutely prepared to go to trial.

But we first wanted to challenge whether what our client allegedly did was a crime at all. When you want to do that, you file something called a motion to dismiss for lack of probable cause.

So that’s what we did.

The Legal Fight

The general idea is that you are making the argument to the judge that, even if the client did everything that the alleged victim says, that still doesn’t qualify as a crime.

It sounds weird, we know. Applied here, what we said to the judge was sort of an odd double talk.

First we said, look, our client says that none of what the student says happened actually happened. And so we want to make that clear: he 100% denies that he was sexual or harassing to her.

But second, even if we assume that everything the student says happened actually happened, our client is still not guilty of the crime the state is charging him with.

And that’s exactly what we argued.

We said fine, we’ll accept for the sake of argument that our client did the things the student says. Even then, all our client is guilty of is bad judgment, not a criminal act.

And since it’s not criminal, the charges should be dismissed.

The Decision

After reading the briefs filed by us and the state, the judge sided with us.

In his 9-page decision, the judge accepted our argument that even if our client did everything the student said he did, it didn’t qualify as the crime the state had charged him with.

Maybe it was something else, maybe not. But it wasn’t the crime the state charged him with.

To understand the judge’s rationale, you first must understand how criminal law works. For every crime, there are certain things the state must prove. These are called elements. Every criminal charge has various elements. And for a person to be guilty, the state must prove every element.

That is their job. That is the rule.

So here, what we argued—and what the judge ultimately accepted—is that the state failed to prove every element of the offense our client was charged with.

Specifically, the state failed to prove that our client’s conduct, viewed through the lens of the student’s account, qualified as harassment under Minnesota law.

Was our client’s conduct odd? Perhaps. Weird? Maybe. Inappropriate, even? Possibly. But criminal? Absolutely not.

Since the state failed to prove this element, the rule is that the entire charge must be dismissed. Because in the criminal law, it doesn’t matter if you can prove all the elements but one. Close isn’t good enough, because this isn’t horseshoes or hand grenades; it’s all or nothing. And since the state couldn’t do all, it got nothing.

The Takeaway

The lesson of this case is twofold: resisting the urge to jump to conclusions and prosecutorial discretion. Here, it was easy to believe the student. Students often do tell the truth. But this case is a good cautionary tale of jumping to a conclusion too quickly. That’s what happened here.

Our client lost his job and his status in the community, only later to be vindicated when the charges were dismissed. Had everyone kept their powder dry, and waited for the process to play out, perhaps this wouldn’t have happened. Because they didn’t, however, we’ll never know.

Second, the prosecutor should have known better than to ever charge our client with what was charged. A close reading of the law, applied to the student’s version of the facts, should have shown that what our client did was not a crime.

Now telling that to a family who thinks their daughter was harmed by a teacher is hard stuff, no doubt. But that’s the prosecutor’s job. The job is to do what’s right, not what’s easy. And here, it seems like the latter was chosen over the former.

We’re happy our client managed to clear his name. But it didn’t come without a cost. And we can’t help but think it could have been avoided had everyone not rushed to judgment.

He’s free, but he’s not unscathed.

We’re just glad the damage wasn’t worse.