Opsahl v. State

• Decision Date: 09 March 2006
• Docket Number: No. A04-1992.,A04-1992.
• Parties: Darby Jon OPSAHL, petitioner, Appellant, v. STATE of Minnesota, Respondent.
• Court: Minnesota Supreme Court

710 N.W.2d 776

Darby Jon OPSAHL, petitioner, Appellant, v. STATE of Minnesota, Respondent.

No. A04-1992.

Supreme Court of Minnesota.

March 9, 2006.

COPYRIGHT MATERIAL OMITTED

John Stewart, Public Defender, Lawrence Hammerling, Deputy State Public Defender, Minneapolis, MN, for Appellant.

Mike Hatch, Attorney General, St. Paul, MN, Michael K. Junge, Amy Elizabeth Olson, McLeod County Attorney, Glencoe, MN, for Respondent.

Heard, considered, and decided by the court en banc.

OPINION

ANDERSON, RUSSELL A., Chief Justice.

Darby Jon Opsahl was convicted of first-degree murder for the shooting death of Margaret Rehmann in October 1986. On direct appeal, we affirmed. State v. Opsahl (Opsahl I), 513 N.W.2d 249, 255 (Minn.1994). Opsahl's subsequent petition for postconviction relief was denied without evidentiary hearing by the postconviction court. On appeal, we affirmed in part, reversed in part, and remanded to the postconviction court with instructions to conduct an evidentiary hearing on Opsahl's claims that he was entitled to a new trial because of prosecutorial misconduct and witness recantations. Opsahl v. State (Opsahl II), 677 N.W.2d 414, 425 (Minn.2004). Following the evidentiary hearing, the postconviction court rejected Opsahl's remaining claims and again denied his petition for relief. We affirm.

In October 1986, Margaret Rehmann was found murdered in her home in rural Lester Prairie, Minnesota. An extensive police investigation was initially unable to identify a suspect, but approximately a year after the murder Jeff Olson, a friend of Opsahl's, told police that Opsahl and a man named John Kanniainen had been involved in Rehmann's death. Police officers then arranged a meeting with Olson and Opsahl, during which Opsahl told officers that he and Kanniainen had often driven around the Lester Prairie area while drunk and high on drugs, looking for homes to burglarize. During one of their "booze cruises," Kanniainen had gone up to a house, had been greeted by a middle-aged woman, and had gone inside. About 10 minutes later, Opsahl heard a gunshot, and about 20 minutes after that, Kanniainen came out of the house with some half-dollar coins and said that he had shot a woman.

After hearing Opsahl's story, officers accompanied Olson and Opsahl on a car ride through rural McLeod County, during which Opsahl identified the Rehmann residence as a place that could have been where Kanniainen had shot the woman. Opsahl also said that another farm site looked familiar, and that he could not be sure which home it had been because he had been to so many homes on burglaries. Later, Opsahl provided police with another statement and accompanied an officer to a hardware store to identify the type of weapon that Kanniainen had allegedly used in the shooting. Opsahl pointed out a .44 caliber handgun, the same type of gun that had been used in Rehmann's murder.

In 1988, the police informed Opsahl that Kanniainen had been out of state for the entire month in which the Rehmann murder had occurred, and therefore could not have been involved. Confronted with this information, Opsahl said, "if Kanniainen wasn't there, then I wasn't there."

In subsequent interviews, Opsahl gave police several different stories. In a 1989 interview, Opsahl said it could have been Olson or Tim Efteland who had been with him on the burglary instead of Kanniainen. In April 1990, Opsahl claimed that Kanniainen had not been involved in the murder, and that he and Olson had agreed to blame Kanniainen for the murder because Olson hated Kanniainen. In October 1990, Opsahl denied all involvement in the incident, but in April 1992 he again claimed that he had remained in the car while Kanniainen had shot Rehmann.

At Opsahl's trial in 1992, the state presented the testimony of several of Opsahl's acquaintances, all of whom recounted statements made by Opsahl and Olson in which the two had implicated themselves in the Rehmann murder. Opsahl testified in his own defense, but called no other witnesses. Though Opsahl admitted to "booze cruising" with Kanniainen around the time of the Rehmann murder, he denied that he had been involved in the Rehmann murder, that he had been at a burglary scene in McLeod County, or that he had ever told anyone that he had committed a murder. The jury convicted Opsahl of first-degree murder, and we affirmed on direct appeal, holding, inter alia, that the record contained sufficient evidence to support his conviction. Opsahl I, 513 N.W.2d at 255.

In October 2002, Opsahl filed a petition for postconviction relief in district court, and in support of his petition, Opsahl submitted affidavits that suggested that prosecutors had committed misconduct by pressuring witnesses to testify falsely at Opsahl's trial, and also suggesting that, to various degrees, several of the state's witnesses had subsequently recanted their testimony from Opsahl's trial. One such witness, Richard Rogowski, asserted in his affidavit that his trial testimony had been a complete fabrication: he had not actually seen Opsahl at a Fourth of July party in 1988, and Opsahl had never said anything to him about being involved in a burglary and a shooting. Rogowski claimed that he "made up the entire story" he presented at trial because he had received threats from the prosecutor. A second trial witness, Ross Reinitz, signed an affidavit claiming that he told the prosecutor prior to Opsahl's trial that he had not clearly heard the conversation between Opsahl and Olson that he related in his testimony. Reinitz's affidavit also said that he had assumed that the conversation—in which Olson suggested that he and Opsahl could "take care" of a bothersome neighbor like they had taken care of "that old bitch by Lester Prairie"—had been a joke, but that he had not been able to explain this assumption at trial. The affidavit of Laura Roberts, another state trial witness, stated that prior to Opsahl's trial she had told the prosecutor that she was an "unreliable witness" and had "no clear recollection of any conversation with Mr. Opsahl in which he [had] admitted hurting an old lady," but that the prosecutor had nonetheless told her to testify "without qualification."

Opsahl also submitted affidavits from Maury Beaulier, an attorney who had represented Opsahl in 1998, and William O'Keefe, a private investigator who had been hired by Opsahl's counsel. Beaulier's affidavit claimed that another of the state's trial witnesses, Marina Allan, had completely recanted her testimony both in an interview with Beaulier and in a second interview with a hired investigator. O'Keefe's affidavit claimed that state witness Dean Johnson had hinted in an interview that he had actually had several beers—not a single beer, as he had claimed at trial—when he had overheard Opsahl implicate himself in the Rehmann murder.

Based on the evidence in these affidavits, Opsahl claimed that he was entitled to a new trial or, alternatively, an evidentiary hearing. The postconviction court denied Opsahl's request for an evidentiary hearing and denied his petition. On appeal, we reversed the postconviction court's decision to deny an evidentiary hearing, determining that the affidavits presented by Opsahl had established a dispute of material fact with regard to Opsahl's witness-recantation and prosecutorial-misconduct claims, and that Opsahl was therefore entitled to an evidentiary hearing.¹ Opsahl II, 677 N.W.2d at 423-25. We remanded for an evidentiary hearing on these two claims and retained jurisdiction. Id. at 425.

After we remanded the case, some of the allegedly recanting witnesses were interviewed for the state by Detective Matt Rolf. In these interviews, witnesses often contradicted or undermined the statements attributed to them in Opsahl's postconviction affidavits. Rogowski, for one, told Rolf that he actually had seen Opsahl at a Fourth of July party in 1988, contrary to his affidavit. When Rolf confronted Rogowski with his affidavit, Rogowski said, "I don't know what the hell them words are." Rogowski asserted, as he had in his affidavit, that he had "made up the entire story" he had told at trial, but he also asserted that he had not lied at trial. He explained to Rolf, "the mind's not as good as it used to be * * * I abused myself in the chemicals." Roberts also significantly undermined her affidavit, telling Rolf that her assertion in her affidavit that she did not remember the conversation that she had related at trial was a "crock of crap," and that she had testified at trial of her own free will and had "never said [she] was an unreliable witness." Roberts said that the conversation had essentially transpired as she had testified, but that with the benefit of hindsight, Opsahl's statement that he had hurt "the old lady" actually might have been a slang reference to his girlfriend. Allan denied that she had recanted her trial testimony to attorney Beaulier and his investigator, and told Rolf that they had asked her to say that she had lied. She also stood by her trial testimony. Finally, Allan Kroells told Rolf that he had not personally heard Opsahl or Olson make the statements that he had attributed to them at trial; he had only heard third parties attribute the statements to Opsahl and Olson.

After reviewing transcripts of Detective Rolf's interviews, Opsahl claimed that Rolf's actions constituted prosecutorial misconduct. Opsahl claimed that Rolf had improperly intimidated his interviewees by telling them, first, that making two contradictory statements under oath is necessarily perjury, and second, that they could be subject to perjury prosecutions for statements that they had made in the 1992 trial, though arguably the relevant statute of limitations precluded such a prosecution.

At Opsahl's evidentiary hearing in July 2004, several of the witnesses from Opsahl's 1992 trial testified, often contradicting earlier statements that they had made in their affidavits, to...