Murder Conviction Upheld Over Fourth Amendment And Evidentiary Ruling Challenges.

State v. Zornes, Minn.S.Ct., 5/31/2013.  A jury convicted Mr. Zornes of two counts of first degree premeditated murder.  There was an arson conviction in there somewhere as well.  Once Mr. Zornes became a suspect and the police knew where he was, they arrested him out in the woods at his campsite.  In a pat down search of Mr. Zornes, the police found a folding knife.  Strewn about the campsite, they found a hammer, a screwdriver, a utility knife and a scissors.  At the police station, Mr. Zornes invoked his right to remain silent.  In the course of “processing” Mr. Zornes – looking for injuries, taking photos and the like – the officers told him that they were going to use a sexual assault kit to take DNA samples from him.  Mr. Zornes grumbled about this, remarking “this wasn’t anything sexual” or “it wasn’t sexual related.”  Several hours later, the cops got a search warrant for the DNA collection.

Mr. Zornes moved to suppress the evidence obtained from him during the campsite arrest and search; to suppress the results of the DNA testing at the police station; and to suppress the “this wasn’t anything sexual” statement.  Mr. Zornes argued that the stuff seized at the campsite was not sufficiently connected to the crime scene and were thus not relevant.  The trial court allowed the introduction of these things, concluding that what to make of them was the jury’s job not his.  The supreme court agreed, saying that admission of these items had not been an abuse of discretion.

The trial court threw out the DNA testing, saying there was no reason not to have first got the warrant that they got three or so hours afterwards.  No one took issue with that on appeal.  But, the trial judge admitted the statement, saying that Mr. Zornes had made the statement before the cops physically touched him to get the DNA exemplar so the statement had not been the result of the unlawful search to acquire the DNA exemplar.  Justice Paul Anderson, writing for the Court, said that the court didn’t have to decide any of this because any error in admitting the statement was harmless beyond a reasonable doubt. 

During jury selection, the trial court asked two persons, both on a combined witness list, to leave the court room, although one of them was allowed to watch from an observation room.  Mr. Zornes complained about this on appeal, saying that the trial court had deprived him of his right to a public trial.  because jury selection is part of the trial process, a trial judge has substntial discretion whether to exclude a potential witness from the court room.  As to the fellow in the observation room, the state agreed to remove him from the witness list so at that point he became “the general public.”  Under the factors identified in State v. Lindsey, 632 N.W.2d. 652 (Minn. 2001), the court concluded that this second individual, excluded from the court room to observation room, was too trivial an exclusion to implicate Mr. Zorne’s Sixth Amendment right to a public trial.

Finally, the court upheld the trial court’s ruling on impeachment of Mr. Zornes by use of prior convictions, under the Jones factors.