Hennepin County Attorney calls for court to vacate murder conviction of Edgar Barrientos-Quintana
MINNEAPOLIS — Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty is joining the call to vacate the 2009 murder conviction of Edgar Barrientos-Quintana.
In 2009, Barrientos-Quintana was charged with, and convicted of first-degree murder in the death of 18-year-old Jesse Mickelson. The teen was shot and killed in his neighbor's driveway in Minneapolis in October 2008. Barrientos-Quintana is currently serving a life sentence without parole.
In August, the Conviction Review Unit of the Minnesota Attorney General's Office recommended the conviction be vacated and the charges be dismissed, following a three-year investigation of the case.
In a news conference Monday, Moriarty's office filed a court petition agreeing with the recommendation.
"As the attorney general's CRU found, prosecutors from this office and investigators from the Minneapolis Police Department ignored the obvious evidence before them and failed to follow known best practices to convict the man they convinced themselves was responsible for the murder," Moriarty said.
The Conviction Review Unit said it investigated Barrientos-Quintana's alibi that he was in the Maplewood area during the time of the shooting and not in Minneapolis. Security video from Cub Foods in east St. Paul, according to the unit, shows he was there 33 minutes before the shooting.
Phone records that were not presented at trial, according to the unit, supported his claim that he was inside his girlfriend's apartment in Maplewood 27 minutes after the shooting. The unit says Barrientos-Quintana could not have made the journey to and from the crime scene in less than an hour. The jury allegedly didn't hear this evidence.
Moriarty said the unit's report also showed there was no physical evidence, fingerprints, DNA or gun tying Barrientos to the crime.
"Multiple witnesses named someone else as the shooter early on," Moriarty said while talking about the report. "MPD investigators used suggestive and coercive interview techniques with youth witnesses to get them identify Mr. Barrientos-Quintana or to change their descriptions to match Mr. Barrientos-Quintana's appearance that day."
In August, Barrientos-Quintana filed for postconviction relief.
Moriarty says if the court vacates the conviction, her office will dismiss the charges.
Some of Mickelson's family members were with Moriarty during the news conference and said they support the decision to have Barrientos-Quintana's sentence vacated.
"I want to apologize most importantly because I've held a lot of anger for a man that had nothing to do with it. And it hurts to know we were failed because of a wrong conviction," Mickelson's sister, Tina Rosebear, said.
During a separate news conference Monday, Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O'Hara responded to the development and said he stands by the investigators who worked on the case.
"I am concerned that a convicted killer will be set free based only upon a reinterpretation of old evidence rather than the existence of any new facts," he said.
Anna McGinn represents Edgar Barrientos-Quintana, who is now 41 years old.
"We are thrilled that the county attorney's office and the attorney general's office both agree that a horrible miscarriage of justice has occurred for our client Edgar but also for the victim's family," she said.