State's Unilateral Dismissal of Tab Charge or Complaint Need Not Be Made In Good Faith

State v. Olson, Minn.S.Ct., 8/24/2016.  When Mr. Olson's case came up for trial the state's only witness didn't bother to show up. When the trial judge denied the state's continuance request the state dismissed the tab charge and got in the judge's face by saying they would just refile the charge.  Which they did. When Mr. Olson moved to dismiss the refiled charge the trial court denied that motion.  Mr. Olson appealed.  The Court of Appeals said that the state could not use this dismiss/refile workaround to avoid its witness availability problems.

Justice Stras is having none of that.  He pulls out the rule book to find that Rule 30.01 states unambiguously that the prosecutor doesn't need anyone's permission to dismiss either a tab charge or a complaint.   The Justice declines to require that state act in good faith in exercising this authority.

Under a different rule, however, Rule 30.02, the trial court has the discretion to dismiss a charge - whether by tab charge, complaint, or indictment, "if the prosecutor has unnecessarily delayed bringing the defendant to trial."  This rule, the Justice says, applies whether the delay occurred in initially bringing charges or in Mr. Olson's situation, where the state dismisses and then refiles.  The court concludes that the trial court got it right in denying Mr. Olson's dismissal motion, quoting favorably from the trial court's ruling on the dismissal motion:

[The State] did not charge the case in order to obtain an unfair advantage and did not blatantly delay the [d]efendant’s trial. The witness’s unavailability was unknown to the State until the day before trial and the State promptly disclosed the information, continued to negotiate the case and made its intent to recharge known prior to making the continuance request. Further, the case had not been unnecessarily delayed by any continuances prior to the continuance request on the day of trial and the [d]efendant’s trial in the new recharged case was set promptly at the first available date for the parties.