State of Minnesota, Respondent,

This opinion will be unpublished and
may not be cited except as provided by
Minn. Stat. § 480A.08, subd. 3 (2016).

STATE OF MINNESOTA
IN COURT OF APPEALS
A17-0470

State of Minnesota,
Respondent,

vs.

David Carl Thompson,
Appellant.

Filed January 8, 2018
Affirmed
Ross, Judge

Ramsey County District Court
File No. 62-CR-16-4114

Lori Swanson, Attorney General, St. Paul, Minnesota; and

John J. Choi, Ramsey County Attorney, Peter R. Marker, Assistant County Attorney,
St. Paul, Minnesota (for respondent)

Cathryn Middlebrook, Chief Appellate Public Defender, Jennifer L. Lauermann, Assistant
Public Defender, St. Paul, Minnesota (for appellant)

Considered and decided by Ross, Presiding Judge; Johnson, Judge; and Bratvold,
Judge.
U N P U B L I S H E D O P I N I O N
ROSS, Judge
The St. Paul Police Department received a report that appellant David Thompson
pulled a knife on a man in a park and threatened to stab him. Thompson pleaded guilty to
2
making terroristic threats but later moved to withdraw his plea during his sentencing. The
district court denied his motion, and he appeals. Because the district court acted within its
discretion by finding that it would not be fair and just to allow Thompson to withdraw his
plea, and because allowing him to withdraw his plea was unnecessary to correct any
manifest injustice, we affirm.
D E C I S I O N
David Thompson was allegedly causing problems in Mears Park in June 2016. First
he approached a wedding party and told the groom that he wanted to have sex with the
bride and that they could share her. Later he pulled a knife on a man while commenting
about selling the man his guitar, threatening , “I will slice you from a--hole to elbow and
slice your throat.” The state charged Thompson with second-degree assault and making
terroristic threats. Thompson pleaded guilty to making terroristic threats and was
conditionally released from jail. During his sentencing hearing, Thompson moved to
withdraw his plea. The district court held a plea-withdrawal hearing and denied the motion.
On appeal, Thompson argues that the district court abused its discretion by refusing
to allow him to withdraw his guilty plea. A district court has discretion to allow a defendant
to withdraw a plea before sentencing if it is “fair and just” to do so. Minn. R. Crim. P.
15.05, subd. 2 (2016). In applying the fair-and-just assessm ent, the district court must
consider the defendant’s reasons as to why he should be allowed to withdraw his plea and
balance those reasons against any prejudice the state would suffer because it relied on the
defendant’s guilty plea. Id. We will not reverse a district court’s decision to deny a
defendant’s plea-withdrawal motion unless the decision constitutes an abuse of discretion.
3
State v. Raleigh, 778 N.W.2d 90, 97 (Minn. 2010). Thompson fails to demonstrate that the
district court abused its discretion.
Thompson’s reasons for withdrawing his guilty plea were not compelling, and the
district court did not believe they were sincere . He told the district court that he had been
under duress when he entered the plea agreement, claiming that he fear ed that his home
would be burglarized while he sat in jail, which he implied would somehow leave him
homeless. Thompson suggested that he needed to leave jail to secure his home because he
had been unable to ask his landlord to secure the home for him and because he lacked his
landlord’s contact information in jail. He offered this during a rambling, profanity -spiced
dissertation covering many extraneous details, like how he had ended up in the park with
his guitar: “I was so stressed out I grabbed my guitar and stuff, I grabbed me a bottle, had
a little bit of weed. I’m going over to Mears Park to get away from this environment. I’m
jamming, you know what I mean? I’m just jamming having a good time.” And he narrated
his encounter with the wedding party: “Yeah, I flirted, you know, with the bride. She’s
gorgeous, she’s beautiful. Yeah, I want to kiss the bride. I wasn’t charged with that.”
Thompson also claimed his innocence and expressed disappointment that his attorney had
not obtained surveillance-camera video footage of the incident.
The district court is entitled to make credibility assessments in plea-withdrawal
hearings. State v. Aviles-Alvarez, 561 N.W.2d 523, 527 (Minn. App 1997), review denied
(Minn. June 11, 1997). The district court considered Thompson’s stated reasons carefully.
It reviewed the guilty-plea transcript and stated that nothing in it suggested that Thompson
was under duress when he made the plea. His attorney disclosed also that he too had read
4
the transcript, and he said, “So at this point I did advise Mr. Thompson if he wishes to
proceed further with me I don’t see legally where I can make an argument for a withdrawal
of his plea other than the fact that he now wants to withdraw it.” Thompson did not make
a compelling argument that he sincerely was under duress when he entered his guilty plea.
Even if we thought he had, we are in no position on appeal to second-guess the district
court’s credibility assessment.
The district court also found that accepting Thompson’s plea would prejudice the
state because of the amount of time that had passed since the incident. Because the district
court considered Thompson’s statements at the initial plea hearing, was in a position to
assess the credibility of Thompson’s statements, and considered the potential prejudice to
the state, we hold that it did not abuse its discretion.
Thompson also argues that he should be allowed to withdraw his plea because he
pleaded guilty involuntarily and therefore invalidly. The validity of a plea is a question of
law that we review de novo. Raleigh , 778 N.W.2d at 94. The district court must allow a
defendant to withdraw his guilty plea if allowing it is necessary to correct a “manifest
injustice.” Minn. R. Crim. P. 15.05, subd. 1. A manifest injustice exists when a plea is not
constitutionally valid, meaning that it is not accurate, voluntary, or intelligent. Raleigh, 778
N.W.2d at 94. Given that the district court rejected as incredible Thompson’s vague
suggestion that he felt pressured to plead guilty, the alleged pressure also cannot establish
that the district court was required to grant the plea-withdrawal motion to avoid a manifest
injustice. And the kind of pressure Thompson claimed was not the kind of improper
pressure necessary to support a claim of involuntariness. See id. at 96.
5
Thompson next maintains that he should have been allowed to withdraw his plea
because it was involuntary on the ground that it was based on ineffective assistance of
counsel. A plea can be involuntary if a defendant is represented by an attorney whose
advice is not within the “range of competence demanded of attorneys in criminal cases.”
State v. Ecker, 524 N.W.2d 712, 718 (Minn. 1994). We analyze claims of i neffective
assistance of counsel using the two-step test announced in Strickland v. Washington, 466
U.S. 668, 104 S. Ct. 2052 (1984). The first considers whether the attorney’s performance
fell below an objective standard of reasonableness. Id. at 687–88. The second considers
whether the defendant was prejudiced by the attorney’s deficient performance. Id. at 687.
Thompson’s claim fails on the second step of the test. He bases his involuntary-plea claim
on the assertion that his attorney deficiently failed to obtain police reports and surveillance
footage and that he would not have pleaded guilty if his attorney had obtained them. But
Thompson has failed to identify any evidence (or even to argue) that a surveillance camera
was in a position to cover the area where the encounter occurred, that any footage of the
encounter ever existed , or that the footage would have given Thompson a reason to
challenge the witnesses’ accounts of his pulling his knife and making the threatening
comment. And the transcripts reveal that Thompson appears to have complained that his
attorney failed to read police reports of an entirely separate incident in which Thompson
claimed to have been accosted by young children. To the extent he intended to complain
that his attorney failed to review the police reports about his threat with the knife, the
transcript shows that his attorney in fact received the police reports and discussed them
with Thompson. None of the reports in either incident are in the record, and Thompson
6
does not say how they bore on his plea decision. In sum, even if we thought the attorney’s
failure to obtain the police reports and the supposed video footage demonstrated
constitutionally-deficient representation, we would not reverse because Thompson has not
shown that this alleged deficiency affected his decision to plead guilty.
Thompson argues last that his plea was unintelligent, making it invalid under
Raleigh. 778 N.W.2d at 94. We review the validity of a plea de novo. Id. For a plea to be
intelligent a defendant must understand “the charges against him, the rights he is waiving,
and the consequences of his plea.” Id. at 96. “Consequences” refers to “a plea’s direct
consequences, namely the maximum sentence and fine.” Id. Nowhere in his argument does
Thompson assert that he did not understand the charges he faced, the rights he was giving
up, or the possible sentence that awaited him. And if he had asserted any of this, the plea
transcript would undermine that assertion. We hold that Thompson’s plea was not
unintelligent.
Each of Thompson’s challenges to the district court’s plea-withdrawal decision
fails.
Affirmed.