Court Opinion

ID: 9735223
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-26 18:05:54.756614+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:26:56.143252
License: Public Domain

COYNE, Justice
(dissenting).
I respectfully dissent. In my judgment, when tested against the standards articulated in State ex rel. Pearson v. Probate Court of Ramsey County, 205 Minn. 545, 287 N.W. 297 (1939), aff'd, 309 U.S. 270, 60 S.Ct. 523, 84 L.Ed. 744 (1940), and In re Blodgett, 510 N.W.2d 910 (Minn.1994), the evidence supports the trial court’s determination that the appellant should be committed indefinitely to the Minnesota Security Hospital as a psychopathic personality.
Apart from my inability to concur in the majority’s conclusion, I am at a loss to understand what “the base rate statistics for violent behavior among individuals of this person’s background (e.g., data showing the rate at which rapists recidivate, the correlation between age and criminal sexual activity, etc.),” supra maj. op. at 614, can possibly contribute with respect to predicting the seriousness of the danger to the public posed by the release of a certain person. It is the habitual course of criminal sexual conduct revealed by the record of the person in question which provides a basis for predicting serious danger to the public, not the course of misconduct committed by other persons. Not only are the statistics concerning the violent behavior of others irrelevant, but it seems to me wrong to confine any person on the basis not of that person’s own prior conduct but on the basis of statistical evidence regarding the behavior of other people.