An attempt Conviction Does Not Authorize Conditional Release Term

State v. Noggle, Minn.S.Ct., 7/6/2016.  Mr. Noogle pleaded guilty to attempted third-degree criminal sexual conduct.  The attempt statute is Minn.Stat. 609.17.  The Complaint referenced the CSC statute that Mr. Noggle attempted to commit but that Complaint did not charge him with that offense. In the ensuing eight years Mr. Noggle worked his way up from a stay of adjudication to a stay of imposition to an executed sentence.  When the court executed the sentence it also imposed a ten year conditional release term.  Mr. Noggle challenges this conditional release term.

Justice G. Barry Anderson looks at the conditional release statute, Minn.Stat. 609.3455, subd. 6, and sees that attempted third degree criminal sexual conduct is not one of the enumerated statutes that trigger the conditional release term.  Here's what the statute says:

Subd. 6. Mandatory ten-year conditional release term. Notwithstanding the statutory maximum sentence otherwise applicable to the offense . . . when a court commits an offender to the custody of the commissioner of corrections for a violation of section 609.342, 609.343, 609.344, 609.345, or 609.3453, the court shall provide that, after the offender has been released from prison, the commissioner shall place the offender on conditional release for ten years.

Caught by its own obsessive insistence of looking to "the plain language of the statute" the court has no choice but to reverse the lower court's pronouncement of the conditional release term.  

The court resoundingly rebukes the court of appeals for saying that a conviction for an attempt crime is also a violation of the crime attempted.  The court also rejected the notion that an attempt is a "sentence modifier" rather than a crime distinct from the attempted offense.  As long ago as 1980 the court had declared that the crimes of attempt and conspiracy were separate crimes.  State v. Olkon, 299 N.W.2d 89 (Minn. 1980).