State v. Berry

959 N.W.2d 184

STATE of Minnesota, Respondent,

v.Natasha Renae BERRY, Appellant.

A19-0436

Supreme Court of Minnesota.

Filed: May 5, 2021

OPINION

ANDERSON, Justice.

This appeal requires us to determine whether appellant Natasha Renae Berry is required to register as a predatory offender. Berry helped her husband flee from Red Wing to Ohio after he forced laundry employees into a breakroom at gunpoint in an attempt to regain his employment at the laundry. Berry was charged with kidnapping, false imprisonment, and threats of violence.¹ She was also charged with aiding an offender to avoid arrest. Berry pleaded guilty to aiding an offender to avoid arrest in violation of Minn. Stat. § 609.495, subd. 1(a) (2020), and as a result of a plea agreement, the remaining charges were dismissed. At the plea hearing, Berry was ordered to register as a predatory offender based on her conviction for aiding an offender to avoid arrest. Berry appealed the registration requirement, arguing that Minn. Stat. § 243.166, subd. 1b(a) (2020), does not require registration. The court of appeals affirmed. Because we conclude that Berry's conviction and charged offenses do not arise from the same set of circumstances, we reverse the decision of the court of appeals and remand to the district court to vacate the registration requirement.

FACTS

At around 7:02 a.m. on June 8, 2018, Berry entered Crothall Laundry Services in Red Wing. She went into an office and left the building at 7:06 a.m. At 7:07 a.m., Berry's husband entered the building carrying a gun. He ran into two Crothall Laundry managers and began yelling. He was angry because Crothall Laundry had refused to rehire him three days earlier. When one of the managers mentioned calling the police, Berry's husband responded, "[Y]ou aren't going anywhere and you aren't calling anyone." He then told the two managers to go to the breakroom. When he and the managers entered the breakroom, they encountered three other employees. Berry's husband continued yelling about getting his job back. The managers felt that they were hostages and were afraid. Berry's husband then allowed two of the employees to leave the breakroom, but said the managers could not leave.

By approximately 7:08 a.m., one minute after her husband had first entered the building, Berry reentered Crothall Laundry carrying a backpack. She stopped in the hallway in front of the breakroom and told her husband that it was time to leave. He left the breakroom, walked to the end of the hallway, and put the gun into Berry's backpack. Berry and her husband left the building and drove away in an SUV.

The police thought Berry might be a "possible hostage."² A subsequent search of the Red Wing hotel room where Berry and her husband were staying revealed "a large amount of clothing, food, a cell phone, and other personal items." The police traced Berry's cell phone to an area of Interstate 90 near Eyota, heading east. Berry and her husband were arrested in Ohio the next day.

Berry was subsequently charged with kidnapping in violation of Minn. Stat. § 609.25 (2020), false imprisonment in violation of Minn. Stat. § 609.255 (2020), and threats of violence in violation of Minn. Stat. § 609.713 (2020). All three counts alleged aiding and abetting liability under Minn. Stat. § 609.05 (2020). The State also charged Berry with aiding an offender to avoid arrest in violation of Minn. Stat. § 609.495 (2020).

On the morning of trial, Berry pleaded guilty to aiding an offender to avoid arrest in violation of Minn. Stat. § 609.495, subd. 1(a), and the remaining charges were dismissed. As part of the factual basis of her plea, Berry admitted that she was in Red Wing on June 8, 2018, with her husband. She admitted that she knew that "Mr. Berry threatened some people at Crothall Laundry with a firearm" and that she knew that by doing so he had committed a felony offense. She also admitted that she drove her husband to Ohio, and she had done so to help her husband avoid arrest.

When Berry entered her guilty plea, her counsel argued to the district court that, because her conviction for aiding an offender to avoid arrest arose out of circumstances different from the circumstances underlying the dismissed charges, predatory registration was not required. The district court denied the motion, stating:

My understanding of the facts was actually that Ms. Berry went in prior .... She then exited, and then Mr. Berry walked in with a gun and the whole melee took place, and then she went in and actually extricated him out of there and, in my mind, helped resolve the situation by getting her husband out of there and took him out. It sounds like the offense is based upon her then decision to flee the jurisdiction.

My personal thoughts , unfortunately, about predatory registration in this type of a case simply carry no water whatsoever. This would be a case where predatory offender registration, in my mind, wouldn't really apply to Ms. Berry. She was—I don't want to say [an] innocent bystander, but wasn't directly involved. Like I said, my take on it was that she actually helped resolve the situation and avoid further violence. But I have no jurisdiction over deciding who gets to register and who does not ....

So I am going to deny the motion, because I think it is inextricably involved with the underlying offense, regardless of how you look at it. But for the offense at Crothall Laundry, they would not have been fleeing to another state.

(Emphasis added.)

The district court later issued an amended sentencing order finding that Berry's conviction for aiding an offender to avoid arrest was "inextricably interwoven with the underlying offenses requiring registration" and therefore Berry's conviction "arose out of the same set of circumstances as the Kidnapping and False Imprisonment offenses."

Berry appealed the registration requirement. State v. Berry , No. A19-0436, 2020 WL 289060, at *1 (Minn. App. Jan. 21, 2020). The court of appeals affirmed, reasoning that, because Berry's charged predatory offenses arose out of the same set of circumstances as her conviction offense, she was required to register as a matter of law. Id. at *3. We granted Berry's petition for review.

ANALYSIS

Berry challenges the application of the predatory registration statute to her conviction. We review the district court's findings of fact for clear error and its application of the law to those facts de novo. State v. Degroot , 946 N.W.2d 354, 365 (Minn. 2020) ; State v. Jones , 848 N.W.2d 528, 533 (Minn. 2014) ("We review the district court's findings of historical fact under the clearly erroneous standard, but we review the district court's application of the law to those facts de novo.").

"[T]he primary purpose of [ Minn. Stat. § 243.166 ] is to create an offender registry to assist law enforcement with investigations." Boutin v. LaFleur , 591 N.W.2d 711, 717 (Minn. 1999). Before 1993, only persons convicted of enumerated predatory offenses were required to register. Minn. Stat. § 243.166, subd. 1 (1992). But in 1993, the Legislature amended Minnesota's predatory registration statute to also require registration for persons who are simply charged with predatory offenses, as long as they are convicted of "another offense arising out of the same set of circumstances." See Act of May 20, 1993, ch. 326, art. 10, § 1, 1993 Minn. Laws 1974, 2090; State v. Lopez , 778 N.W.2d 700, 704 (Minn. 2010) (suggesting that the purpose of the 1993 amendment was to prevent defendants from using plea agreements to avoid registration).³ We have observed that, "[w]hile the threshold factual showing of probable cause necessary to support a charge is low," the 1993 amendment "stopped short of requiring registration in every case where a predatory offense is charged." Lopez , 778 N.W.2d at 705. Under Minnesota law, a person is required to register as a predatory offender when the person was charged with one or more enumerated offenses and "convicted of ... that offense or another offense arising out of the same set of circumstances." Minn. Stat. § 243.166, subd. 1b(a) (2020).

Two of the charged offenses here, kidnapping and false imprisonment, require predatory registration; the offense of aiding an offender to avoid arrest does not require predatory registration. Id. , subd. 1b(a)(1)(ii), (2)(ii). Berry is required to register as a predatory offender only if her conviction for aiding an offender to avoid arrest arose out of the same set of circumstances as the charged offenses of kidnapping or false imprisonment.

Berry makes two arguments. First, she argues that the district court erred by applying a "but for" test.⁴ Second, Berry argues that the court of appeals, which applied the "same set of circumstances" test, erred by affirming the district court's determination that the conviction for aiding an offender to avoid arrest arose out of the same set of circumstances as the kidnapping and false imprisonment charges.

We have addressed the "same set of circumstances" provision of Minn. Stat. § 243.166, subd. 1b(a)(1), most recently in Lopez . The defendants in Lopez , two brothers, had sold methamphetamine to a confidential informant and, 10 days later, in an attempt to collect the remaining balance on the drug deal, kidnapped the informant and the informant's friend. 778 N.W.2d at 702. The defendants were subsequently charged with kidnapping—an enumerated predatory offense requiring registration under section 243.166—and a first-degree controlled-substance crime.⁵ Id. at 703. The defendants were eventually convicted of the drug charges, but the kidnapping charges against both were dismissed. Id. The defendants were ordered to register as predatory offenders as required by section 243.166 ; they appealed the registration requirement. Id.

In Lopez , we rejected arguments that predatory registration is required when the convicted offense and the charged offense arise out of "related circumstances" or where the two share a "single...