Predatory Offender Statute Does Not Require Written Notice of Change in Employment

State v. Munger, Minn.Ct.App., 1/12/2015.  The state charged Mr. Munger with three counts of failure to register under the predatory registration statute:  (1) Failure to provide written notice five days before he moved from Minnesota to Colorado; (2) failure to inform his agent or law enforcement authority that he was no longer employed; and (3) failure to return the annual verification letter sent to him in Colorado.  Mr. Munger’s underlying conviction that triggered registration was an assault in the second degree, the jury having acquitted him of kidnapping and false imprisonment charges involving an adult.  At the time of that conviction, kidnapping required registration only if a minor was involved.  Mr. Munger moved to dismiss these three charges because he was not a “person required to register.”  The trial court denied that motion and the judge convicted him of all three counts.  The court imposed a concurrent thirty-six month sentence of counts one and three but imposed a consecutive sentence of one year and a day on the other one.

On appeal, Mr. Munger argued that the registration statute does not require written notice of change in employment.  That, it turns out, is correct.  Even so, however, there was enough evidence to prove that he had failed to give even verbal notice that he’d quit his job when he moved to Colorado.   On the dismissal argument – acquittal of the offenses that required registration – Mr. Munger’s argument was that acquitted charges cannot support a probable cause finding for purposes of the registration statute.  This is a riff on State v. Lopez, 778 N.W.2d 700 (Minn. 2010), which held that an offender does not need to be convicted of a predatory offense in order to trigger the registration requirements so long as the predatory offense is support by probable cause.  In Lopez, the predatory offense had been dismissed.  In State v. Haukos, 874 N.W.2d 270 (Minn.Ct.App. 2014) the court of appeals affirmed the use of acquitted charges to require registration.  The court was not willing to revisit that holding.