Conviction Review Unit recommends 2009 Hennepin County murder conviction be vacated
Edgar Barrientos files petition for post-conviction relief
After three-year investigation, CRU issues 293-page report highlighting exculpatory evidence jury never heard, inaccuracies in how evidence was presented to jury
August 21, 2024 (SAINT PAUL) — The Conviction Review Unit of the Minnesota Attorney General’s Office announced today it has recommended that the 2009 conviction in Hennepin County of Edgar Barrientos for first-degree murder be vacated and that the charges be dismissed. The recommendation follows a three-year investigation, culminating in a 180-page report compiled by the Attorney General’s Conviction Review Unit (CRU).
Based on the CRU’s report, Mr. Barrientos filed a petition for post-conviction relief in the Hennepin County District Court. He is asking the court to vacate and dismiss all charges against him. The petition and the CRU’s report are available by searching Court File Number 27-CR-08-53942 at Minnesota Court Records Online.
Mr. Barrientos was convicted of murder on May 28, 2009, and sentenced to life without the opportunity for parole. The crime occurred just after sunset on Saturday, October 11, 2008. Jesse Mickelson, an 18-year-old high school student, was gunned down in his neighbor’s driveway. 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. The crime occurred just behind Roosevelt High School in South Minneapolis. It devastated Jesse’s family, friends, and classmates, and stunned the neighborhood.
At trial, the state’s case rested on two eyewitnesses who identified Mr. Barrientos as the shooter and a witness who claimed to be in the drive-by car when Jesse was shot.
Mr. 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 the east side of Saint Paul, where he was shopping in a grocery store approximately 33 minutes before the shooting.
The jury deliberated for three days: at one point, it was split, with three members strongly favoring a verdict of not guilty. Ultimately, the jury found Mr. Barrientos guilty of first-degree premeditated murder for the benefit of a gang.
During its lengthy investigation, the CRU found exculpatory evidence that the jury never heard. This evidence supported Mr. Barrientos’s claim of innocence. The CRU also discovered inaccuracies in the way the state presented several crucial pieces of evidence to the jury. The CRU concluded that had the jury heard an accurate portrayal of the evidence, this evidence would have created reasonable doubt in an already skeptical jury.
The CRU investigated Mr. Barrientos’s alibi and found corroboration for his claim that he was in the Maplewood area during the time of the shooting and not in Minneapolis. Security video from Cub Foods in east Saint Paul confirms his location 33 minutes before the shooting, and phone records that were 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.
Mr. Barrientos also did not match the witnesses’ description of the shooter. Seven eyewitnesses saw the shooter, and they all consistently described the shooter as a Hispanic man with a bald or shaved head. But Mr. Barrientos was not bald on the day of the shooting. Video evidence shows he 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. 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 Mr. Barrientos’s.
The CRU’s investigation also uncovered serious problems with the eyewitness identifications. The investigators violated the eyewitness-identification protocols in each of the eyewitness identification procedures, but the investigator’s testimony at trial left the jury with the impression that the protocols were followed. The investigators showed witnesses an outdated photo of Barrientos with a shaven bald head even after it was clear that Mr. Barrientos had short dark hair at the time of the shooting. Investigators waited weeks to present an essential witness with a photo lineup, which gave the witness time to view the numerous photos of Barrientos that were circulating in the media at the time. An eyewitness, who was related to Jesse and got a good look at the shooter, did not select Barrientos’s photo when investigators presented him with a lineup. Instead, he focused on a different person, saying that person shared similar features with the shooter. Neither the jury nor the appellate court ever heard this important exculpatory fact.
The CRU’s investigation also finds the state’s principal witness — a gang member who had been one of the first-named suspects in the shooting — 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 Mr. Barrientos when Mr. Barrientos shot Jesse. 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.
Unfortunately, after Mr. Barrientos became a suspect in the shooting, the state’s investigation failed to seriously consider and rule out plausible alternative suspects. As a result, Mr. Barrientos was the only person convicted of the murder, which had been carried out by at least three people, according to the witnesses from the scene.
The CRU’s report details the facts it uncovered and concludes there is ample evidence to substantiate Mr. Barrientos’s claim of innocence. As a result, the Attorney General has recommended that Mr. Barrientos’s conviction be vacated and the charges against him dismissed.
