State v. LaFountain, Minn.Ct.App., 8/28/2017. Mr. LaFountain is required to register under Minnesota's predatory offender registration laws. In October, 2015 he was convicted of violating those registration requirements but that's not what this case is about. Keep reading. About three weeks after this conviction local sheriff's deputies confirmed that Mr. LaFountain no longer lived at the address he'd given to the registry officials, and that he no longer worked for the employer that he'd listed with them.
A week later Mr. LaFountain showed up at the local law enforcement center and told them that he needed to update his registration information. The deputy pulled up the file and noticed that Mr. LaFountain was out of compliance and had been out of compliance for some time. The deputy asked Mr. LaFountain what was up that that; Mr. LaFountain essentially confessed, stating that he understood the registration requirements generally, and he knew that he was supposed to have updated his address within five days of changing it. He went on to tell the deputy some explanation that he'd been evicted from his registered address but still had some stuff there and didn't get everything out until just a day or so ago.The deputy then told Mr. LaFountain that the county attorney had already been sent a report about his noncompliance.
Sure enough the state charged Mr. LaFountain with failure to register. He moved to suppress the statements that he'd made to the deputy when he had gone down to update his registration information. He said that those statements had been made in violation of his Fifth Amendment privilege against self incrimination. The trial court denied this motion, saying that the predatory registration statute was civil and regulatory, rather than penal, and so no Fifth Amendment privilege was implicated.
The court of appeals continues to say that the registration statute is not a criminal statute. The court reviews the tortured history of Minnesota's registration statute, and its interpretation. Although not implicating the Fifth Amendment the Minnesota Supreme Court has two times said that the registration statute is not penal: Boutin v. LaFleur, 591 N.W.2d 711; Kaiser v. State, 641 N.W.2d 900 (Minn. 2002); and the U.S. Supreme Court has reached the same conclusion in Smith v. Doe, 538 U.S. 84, 123 S. Ct. 1140.
But, Mr. LaFountain said, look at State v. Jones, 729 N.W.2d 1 (Minn. 2007), where the court said that Minnesota could prosecute an enrolled tribal member for failure to register even when that offense occurred on that member's reservation. The court reached this conclusion by saying that the registration statute was "criminal/prohibitory" and not "civil/regulatory." Although Mr. LaFountain thought he had the court on this, he didn't:
We acknowledge that our use in Boutin and Kaiser of the terms “punitive”—which we used interchangeably with “criminal”—and “civil, regulatory” could cause confusion in our analysis under the Cabazon/Stone test, which distinguishes conduct that is “criminal/prohibitory” from that which is “civil/regulatory.” But “punitive” is not the same as “prohibitory,” and the definition of “regulatory” under the [Mendoza-Martinez] analysis of Boutin and Kaiser does not have the same meaning as “regulatory” employed by Pub. L. 280 and Cabazon.
Not only that, more recently, the court pointed out that the Minnesota Supreme Court had recently declined to overrule Kaiser and concluded that a defense attorney's failure to advise a defendant about predatory registration requirements before entry of a guilty plea did not violate a defendant's right to effective assistance of counsel. Taylor v. State, 887 N.W.2d 821, 825 (Minn. 2016). Minnesota continues to adhere to the "collateral consequences" dichotomy and registration is one of those "collateral consequences."
Mr. LaFountain also argued that the registration statute compelled him either to provide information or face a criminal charge for failing to do so and thus his answers were compelled in violation of the Fifth Amendment. The trial court, however, had made a finding that Mr. LaFountain's statements were voluntary and so there was no compulsion:
We therefore conclude that LaFountain’s statements to the investigator are not compelled for Fifth-Amendment purposes, and his voluntary decision to speak to the investigator does not implicate a privilege against self-incrimination
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