Court Opinion

ID: 9883412
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-10-06 01:42:10.284009+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T15:25:30.917130
License: Public Domain

PARKER, Judge
(concurring specially).
I agree with the majority that the court’s instruction on Minn.Stat. § 169.91, subd. 1(7) (1986), requires reversal, but I believe further that the failure to submit an instruction on self-defense was prejudicial error. Jensen was convicted of intentionally obstructing or hindering an officer in lawful execution of legal process. His testimony, corroborated by his father and his 13-year-old son, was that the officer assaulted him after he refused to sign the ticket (ironically, the officer was wrong on the law in requiring it). He further described his own actions as turning away from the side of the squad car to question the deputy, orally questioning the necessity of being handcuffed and refusing to hold his arms in a position to be handcuffed, but denied any assault on the officer.
His .theory in requesting the jury be given an instruction on self-defense appears to have been that his non-assaultive actions in resisting excessive force used by the deputy to effect an arrest for a petty misdemeanor established a factual basis sufficient to require submission of the issue. Inasmuch as the jury rejected the prosecution charge that he resisted arrest by force and violence, they presumably accepted his version of his physical behavior. Had the jury been given the option of viewing his actions either as resisting a lawful arrest or as self-defense to the officer’s use of unnecessary force, they may have chosen the latter and, hence, prejudice seems clearly to be present.
I would hold that defense testimony of unreasonable force and defendant’s non-as-saultive resistance required an appropriate instruction on self-defense, see State v. Kutckara, 350 N.W.2d 924, 927 (Minn.1984), and that the burden of proof on the issue was on the state, see State v. King, 287 N.W.2d 636-37 (Minn.1979).