Anderson v. State, Minn.Ct.App., 10/24/2011. Employees at a Cub Foods believed that they saw a bunch of kids shoplifting and then jumping into a gold van driven by Ms. Anderson. The local constabulary gave chase; Ms. Anderson eventually drove the van into a fortuitously open garage. Everybody jumped out of the van, and closed the garage door. The homeowner, who was upstairs changing her daughter’s diaper, upon hearing all this commotion in her house, came downstairs to find six strangers in the living room.
The state charged Ms. Anderson with second degree burglary, with fleeing a police officer in a motor vehicle as the predicate crime. The district court found her guilty on stipulated facts; Ms. Anderson maintained that the fleeing didn’t count for purposes of the burglary statute. She argued that the predicate crime had to be one against a person or property; and that the fleeing offense, like trespass, was complete upon her unauthorized entry into the garage. The court of appeals rejects out of hand the first argument and then turned to the second one. They reject that one as well.
Trespass, the court says, requires an unauthorized entry and is thus subsumed within the burglary statute that has the same requirement. Here, Ms. Anderson was intent on eluding the police, something she thought she could accomplish by driving the van completely into the garage and then shutting the garage door. Unlike football, where the touchdown occurs when the player breaks the plane of the end zone, fleeing requires that the player’s entire body be in the end zone. Ms. Anderson did not complete the fleeing offense until she was able to close the garage door and thus the offense continued after the front of the van broke the plane of the garage and until the tail pipe did the same.
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