Edgar Barrientos murder conviction vacated after AGO uncovered evidence of innocence

AGO’s Conviction Review Unit helps free man wrongfully convicted in 2009; Barrientos released from prison, case against him dismissed

November 7, 2024 (SAINT PAUL) — Yesterday afternoon, a Hennepin County District Court set aside Edgar Barrientos Quintana’s 2009 first-degree murder conviction based on evidence that the Conviction Review Unit (CRU) of the Minnesota Attorney General’s Office uncovered in an exhaustive investigation. In vacating Mr. Barrientos’s conviction, the court ordered him released from prison pending further proceedings in his case. Subsequently, the Hennepin County Attorney’s Office dismissed the case.

Mr. Barrientos spent 16 years in prison for the October 2008 murder of 18-year-old Jesse Mickelson, a crime he did not commit.

The CRU’s 180-page report, issued in August 2024, recommended that Mr. Barientos’s conviction be vacated after it found convincing evidence of his innocence. After a thorough review of the case and the CRU’s investigation, the Hennepin County Attorney’s Office joined with Mr. Barrientos's attorneys in asking the court to vacate his conviction.

The report on Mr. Barrientos is available on the Conviction Review Unit’s page on the Minnesota Attorney General’s Office website.

“I established Minnesota’s first-ever Conviction Review Unit to identify and correct wrongful convictions,” said Attorney General Ellison. “Convicting an innocent person does not serve the interests of justice and benefits no one but the true perpetrators. Yesterday, the work our CRU did has led to an innocent man being freed after serving 16 years in prison. I want to thank Mr. Barrientos’s attorneys for their tireless advocacy for his innocence and the Hennepin County Attorney for working with them to ensure Mr. Barrientos is no longer in prison for a crime he did not commit.

“My thoughts are with Jesse’s friends and family, who lost him to a senseless act of violence, and who are still waiting for justice,” added Ellison. “Mr. Barrientos was deprived of his freedom, and his loved ones were deprived of his presence, for the last 16 years. This case underscores the importance of reviewing claims of wrongful convictions without fear or favor, and when evidence leads to the conclusion that the wrong person was convicted of a crime, acting to correct that injustice.”

The CRU initiated its review of Mr. Barrientos’s conviction upon his application to the CRU for review. Minnesotans who claim they have been wrongly convicted of a crime may apply to the CRU to have their convictions reviewed, as Mr. Barrientos did. An application to the CRU is not a guarantee of review: the CRU screens all applications with an unbiased eye to determine whether there are plausible claims of a wrongful conviction. Of the approximately 1,100 applications the CRU has received, it closed approximately 850 of them without offering relief to the applicant. The vast majority of the remaining applications are pending further review. Upon that review, the CRU may begin a more in-depth investigation to thoroughly explore the applicant’s claim, or it may close the case.

The CRU’s report on Mr. Barrientos’s innocence is the third such report the CRU has issued. In June 2024, the CRU recommended that Brian Pippitt’s 2001 conviction for murder in Aitkin County be vacated. Subsequently, Mr. Pippitt’s attorney filed a motion to vacate his conviction; the case is pending. In January 2023, the CRU recommended that Thomas Rhodes’s 1997 conviction for second-degree murder be vacated. Mr. Rhodes subsequently agreed to plead guilty to a lesser charge of second-degree manslaughter and a court vacated Mr. Rhodes’s murder conviction and freed him from prison.

Case Background

Edgar Barrientos Quintana 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, 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 not guilty verdict. 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 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, the prosecutor repeated the unfounded assertion in closing argument, 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 selected a different person as looking similar to the shooter. Neither the jury nor the appellate court ever heard this important exculpatory fact.   

The CRU’s investigation found the state’s principal witness unreliable. He was a gang member who had been one of the first-named suspects in the shooting. Over the course of three coercive interviews, the investigators told him that he would be treated as a witness, and not as a suspect, if he stated he was in the drive-by vehicle with Barrientos when Barrientos shot Jesse. Witnesses, they told him, don’t go to jail. 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.

History of Minnesota’s Conviction Review Unit

In October 2020, Attorney General Ellison announced the creation of the Conviction Review Unit in the Attorney General’s Office. Minnesota’s CRU is one of only a handful in the country that operates on a statewide basis through an Attorney General’s Office. 

In January 2021, Attorney General Ellison announced the 17 members of the Conviction Review Advisory Board, comprised of leading experts and practitioners in criminal justice.

In April 2021, Carrie Sperling started as the CRU Director.

In June 2021, the CRU Advisory Board ratified one of the most expansive charters of a conviction review unit in the United States. Minnesota’s charter sets forth the guiding principles, policies governing case review, case review criteria, and other policies governing the CRU. 

In August 2021, the CRU began accepting applications from individuals who claim they are wrongfully convicted.