Francis v. State of Minnesota, Minn.S.Ct., 4/24/2013. A jury convicted Mr. Francis of various murder convictions. In this post conviction petition – which is either his third one or his fifth one depending on who’s doing the counting - Mr. Francis claimed that since his conviction he had acquired evidence he hadn’t known about before trial about the way in which the grand jury was assembled, which he claimed violated his rights to due process and equal protection. This new information thus satisfied the “interests of justice” exception to the two year limitations period.
Justice Wright acknowledged that the precise way in which Hennepin County assembled a grand jury was not in the county’s jury administration plan. However, these details were contained in an Opinion issued some ten years before Mr. Francis’s trial in Hennepin County v. Perry, 561 N.W.2d 889 (Minn. 1997).
Mr. Francis made the mistake of conceding that he had actually read the Perry opinion when he was first researching this grand jury issue back in 2005 or 2006. One of the factors that a court can consider under the “interests of justice” exception is the degree of fault attributable to the person asserting the interest in not getting the petition filed within the time allowed. By his own admission Mr. Francis had known about the very details that he said he’d had great difficulty trying to get from the court administrator’s office early enough to have filed his petition within the time allowed. It was his fault for not getting that done and so there was no abuse of discretion by the post conviction court’s determination that the petition was too late.
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