2009 South Minneapolis Murder Conviction Should Be Vacated: MN AG

ST. PAUL, MN — The office of Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison on Wednesday announced it is recommending a 2009 first-degree murder conviction in Hennepin County be vacated and that the charges be dismissed.

Edgar Barrientos, 41, was sentenced to life in prison without the opportunity for parole in the shooting death of Jesse Mickelson, an 18-year-old high school student.

Mickelson was gunned down in his neighbor’s driveway just after sunset on Saturday, Oct. 11, 2008, behind Roosevelt High School in South Minneapolis.

The shooting "had the hallmarks of a gang-related drive-by shooting, but no one believed that Jesse, who was not a member of a gang, was the target," according to Ellison's office.

At trial, prosecutors presented two eyewitnesses who identified Barrientos as the shooter and a third witness claimed to be in the drive-by car when Mickelson was shot.

Barrientos’s attorneys unsuccessfully presented a defense of mistaken identification and argued there was not enough time for Barrientos to get to the crime scene from a Cub Foods on the east side of Saint Paul.

The jury deliberated for three days and ultimately found Barrientos guilty of first-degree premeditated murder for the benefit of a gang.

For the past three years, the Conviction Review Unit (CRU) of the Minnesota Attorney General’s Office investigated the shooting and said it found evidence supporting Barrientos’s claim of innocence but was never heard by the jury.

At trial, Barrientos claimed he was in the Maplewood area during the time of the shooting and not in Minneapolis.

According to CRU, security footage from Cub Foods in east Saint Paul confirms his location 33 minutes before the shooting, and phone records never presented at trial corroborated his claim that he was inside his girlfriend’s apartment in Maplewood just 27 minutes after the shooting.

"Mr. Barrientos could not have made the journey to and from the crime scene in less than an hour. The jury never heard this evidence that corroborated Mr. Barrientos’s alibi," the attorney general's office said.

Barrientos also did not match the witnesses’ description of the shooter, the CRU investigation found.

Seven eyewitnesses saw the shooter, and they all consistently described the shooter as a Hispanic man with a bald or shaved head. But Barrientos was not bald on the day of the shooting, CRU said, but instead had short, dark hair.

At trial, however, the state presented testimony from an investigator that witnesses described a shooter with short hair.

"To be clear, no witness in any interview had described the shooter as having short hair," the attorney general's office said. "Nevertheless, when the prosecutor presented closing argument, she repeated the unfounded assertion, and the jury was left with the false impression that some of the witnesses described a shooter who had short hair, just like Barrientos’s."

The CRU also found that the state’s principal witness — a gang member who had been one of the first-named suspects in the shooting — was unreliable.

"Over the course of three coercive interviews, the investigators promised him he would not go to jail if he testified that he was in the car" with Barrientos when Jesse was shot.

"And although the principal witness heard details about the crime from investigators, the principal witness continued to give wildly inconsistent accounts of the shooting and its aftermath, accounts that conflicted with known evidence from the investigation."