Post Conviction Claim of “Newly Discovered Evidence” Consisting of Testing Deficiencies of Crime Lab is Time Barred

Roberts v. State, Minn.Ct.App., 11/17/2014.  Back in 2005, Mr. Roberts pled guilty to a drug offense.  During what was described as a “routine traffic stop” officers smelled a “strong odor” of marijuana emanating from within Mr. Roberts’ car and then they saw a small plastic bag that turned out to have forty-nine individually wrapped rocks of suspected crack cocaine fall out of his pants.  The St. Paul crime lab tested twenty-one of the rocks, all of which tested positive for cocaine.

When the story broke about the troubles with the St. Paul crime lab Mr. Roberts filed a post conviction petition asking to withdraw his guilty plea.  In his petition he did not, however, claim that what the crime lab had tested in his case was not cocaine.  Instead, he summarized the various problems that had come to light at the lab and said something about the testing program no longer being generally accepted in the scientific community.  The post conviction court denied the petition without a hearing.

That court said, as Mr. Roberts conceded, that his petition was beyond the two year limitations period and so the petition had to meet one of the exceptions to that limitations period.  Mr. Roberts maintained that two of the exceptions applied:  newly discovered evidence, and interests of justice. Both the post conviction court and the court of appeals reject each of these claims.

Now, a petition that asserts one of these exceptions has to be filed within two years of the date the claim arises.  A claim arises when you knew or should have known that the claim existed.  Mr. Roberts knew back in 2005 that the state’s case depended in large part on the lab testing.  He knew that the lab had concluded that all those rocks – well, at least twenty-one of them – contained cocaine and yet he neither challenged that conclusion nor sought independent expert testimony to rebut it.  Another impediment for Mr. Roberts is that none of that stuff about the general deficiencies of the crime lab established that he was innocent, which he must do under the newly discovered evidence exception. 

The other exception, interests of justice, is also of no avail to Mr. Roberts.  Although the court recites a litany of reasons, the real fear is that if Mr. Roberts is allowed to reopen his nine year old conviction on the basis of generalized concerns about the crime lab, then, truly, the horses are out of the barn.