State of Minnesota, Respondent,

This opinion will be unpublished and
may not be cited except as provided by
Minn. Stat. § 480A.08, subd. 3 (2018).

STATE OF MINNESOTA
IN COURT OF APPEALS
A18-0525

State of Minnesota,
Respondent,

vs.

Patrick Sunnyboy Samuels,
Appellant.

Filed January 14, 2019
Affirmed
Schellhas, Judge

Clay County District Court
File No. 14-CR-16-3672

Cathryn Middlebrook, Chief Appellate Public Defender, Chang Y. Lau, Assistant Public
Defender, St. Paul, Minnesota (for appellant)

Keith M. Ellison, Attorney General, St. Paul, Minnesota; and

Brian J. Melton, Clay County Attorney, Michael D. Leeser, Assistant County Attorney,
Moorhead, Minnesota (for respondent)

Considered and decided by Jesson, Presiding Judge; Halbrooks, Judge; and
Schellhas, Judge.

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U N P U B L I S H E D O P I N I O N
SCHELLHAS, Judge
Appellant challenges his conviction of obstructing legal process, arguing that he did
not obstruct an officer engaged in the performance of the officer ’s official duties. We
affirm.
FACTS
On an evening in October 2016, F.A., a store manager in Moorhead, called the
nonemergency police number for assistan ce after discovering appellant Patrick Samuels
sleeping on a store bench. Moorhead Police Officer Zachary Johnson responded, smelled
alcohol coming from Samuels, and, after unsuccessfully attempting to wake Samuels by
speaking to him, woke him by using a “sternum rub.” Samuels became belligerent, yelled,
and made a “spectacle” in the store . Officer Johnson then walked Samuels outside of the
store, where Samuels continued yelling at employees inside the store. Officer Johnson
asked Samuels to step over to hi s squad car for questioning, but Samuels refused. Officer
Johnson then grabbed Samuels’s arm, but Samuels pulled away and st arted backing up.
With the help of a second officer, Officer Johnson carried Samuels to his squad car while
Samuels “actively resisted.”
Respondent State of Minnesota charged Samuels with misdemeanor obstructing
legal process under Minn. Stat. § 609.50, subd. 1 (2016). The district court appointed a
public defender for Samuels and conducted a bench trial. The state called F.A., who
testified about how she discovered Samuels asleep, the arrival of Officer Johnson , and
Samuels’s reaction. Officer Johnson testified about waking Samuels, escorting him

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outside, and Samuels’s resistance to his requests. Without objection by Samuels, the state
entered into evidence the squad-car video of the events. The video shows Officer Johnson
escorting Samuels out of the store and asking Samuels to step over to his squad car. The
video also captures Samuels’s multiple slurred statements of, “I’m not gonna go away.”
And it shows Samuels backing away from and swatting at Officer Johnson as he reaches
for Samuels’s arm , and continuing to pull away from Officer Johnson until the second
officer arrives to assist.
Samuels testified at trial and claimed that he became tired after shopping with a
friend at the store and laid down on a bench. He testified that he had drunk in the morning
and was “a little bit tipsy” when Officer Johnson woke him. He remembered F.A. waking
him, and claimed that Officer Johnson arrive d and pepper -sprayed him in the store. He
denied resisting the officers, testifying that he “wanted to walk away from the situation.”
On redirect, Officer Johnson denied using pepper-spray on Samuels in the store.
The district court found that “Officer Johnson was engaged in the performance of
his official duties as a Moorhead Police Officer when he responded to the call from [the
store].” And the court also found that Samuels “actively resisted” and “pulled away” from
Officer Johnson and repeatedly refused to go with him. The court therefore found Samuels
guilty of misdemeanor obstructing legal process.
This appeal follows.

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D E C I S I O N
Samuels argues that insufficient evidence supports his conviction of obstructing
legal process . An appellat e court examining a n insufficiency-of-the-evidence claim
determines whether the evidence, viewed in a light most favorable to the verdict,
sufficiently allows a finding of guilt. Loving v. State, 891 N.W.2d 638, 643 (Minn. 2017).
An appellate court “will n ot overturn a guilty verdict if, giving due regard to the
presumption of innocence and the prosecution’s burden of proving guilt beyond a
reasonable doubt, the [trier of fact] could reasonably have found the defendant guilty of the
charged offense.” State v. Hurd, 819 N.W.2d 591, 598 (Minn. 2012) (quotation omitted).
To convict Samuels of obstructing legal process, the state had to prove that he
“intentionally . . . obstruct[ed], resist[ed], or interefere[d] with a peace officer while the
officer [was] engaged in the performance of official duties.” See Minn. Stat. § 609.50, subd.
1(2) (listing the elements of offense). Samuels’s challenge requires this court to analyze
the meaning of “official duties.” “When a sufficiency -of-the-evidence claim turns on the
meaning of the statute under which a defendant has been convicted, we are presented with
a question of statutory interpretation that we review de novo.” State v. Henderson , 907
N.W.2d 623, 625 (Minn. 2018). If a statute is not ambiguous, this court “appl[ies] its plain
meaning.” Id.
Samuels argues that insufficient evidence supports a finding that he actively resisted
Officer Johnson’s effort to remove him from the store. We disagree. The recording shows
Samuels and the officer walk ing out of the store, and Samuels stopping in the doorway
while stating multiple times “I’m not going nowhere.” The officer then asks Samuels to

5
follow him to his car, and Samuels refuses multiple times. The officer then reaches to grab
Samuels’s arm, and Sam uels swats his arm away. Samuels stated “at least 12 times” that
he was “not going nowhere” after the officer asked him to step away from the store’s
doorway, and then “pulled away . . . and actively resisted” the officer’s attempts to escort
him away. The court concluded that “Samuels resisted Officer Johnson’s attempts to get
him to leave the . . . store and clear the doorway,” and found Samuels guilty of obstructing
legal process. The squad-car video recording supports the court’s findings.1
Samuels argues that once outside of the store, his “refusal to follow Johnson’s orders
did not constitute obstructing legal process because at the time the officer was n ot acting
in his official duty .” The district court found that Officer Johnson was engaged in his
official duties when he responded to F.A.’s call for assistance and during his attempts to
remove Samuels from the store premises. Samuels identifies two cases, State v. Litzau, 893
N.W.2d 405 (Minn. App. 2017), review denied (Minn. June 20, 2017), and State v.
Shimota, 875 N.W.2d 363 (Minn. App. 2016), review denied (Minn. Apr. 27, 2016) , in
which this court discussed the meaning of official duties. Samuels argues that both cases
provide distinguishing facts from his case and support his argument that Offi cer Johnson

1 Samuels also argues that the district court clearly erred when it “found that the video
shows Johnson attempting to get Samuels of out of the store.” But the court did not make
such a finding; it found that the video shows “Officer Johnson and Samuels exiting the
store,” and that “Officer Johnson was attempting to get Samuels out of the store.” Officer
Johnson’s testimony also supports this finding, as he stated that as Samuels left the store,
in between the first and second set of doors leading outside, he “stopped and [Officer
Johnson] asked him to continue walking.”

6
was not engaged in the performance of his official duties at the time of his arrest. Samuels’s
argument is unpersuasive.
In Shimota, an officer initiated a traffic stop of a speeding car and, while speaking
with the driver, noticed multiple indicia that the driver was under the influence of alcohol.
875 N.W.2d at 365. The officer then asked the driver to exit the car to perform field sobriety
tests, and she refused and then physically resisted the officer when he tried to remove her
from the car. Id. A jury found the driver guilty of obstructing legal process. Id. On appeal,
the driver argued that insufficient evidence supported the fact that her arrest was
mandatory, and that the officer therefore was not performing his official duty when he
arrested her. Id. at 372. This court rejected the argument stating:
We can reduce [the] argument to a syllogism: No discretionary
acts are official duties; the officer’s decision to arrest [the
driver] for drunk driving was a discretionary act; therefore, the
officer’s decision to arrest [her] was not an official duty. The
syllogism includes a false premise. Almost all of a police
officer’s enforcement duties —including virtually all
warrantless arrests —are discretionary, so [her] “mandatory”
requirement would render the statute essentially useless.

Id. This court concluded that “if the state need not prove that the obstructed arrest was
legal, it need not, ipso facto, prove further that the obstructed arrest was mandatory.” Id.
at 373. In Litzau, which cited Shimota, this court rejected a defendant’s attempt to define
“official duty” as only a mandatory duty. 893 N.W.2d at 407 –08. This court affirmed the
defendant’s conviction for obstructing legal process whe n he resisted being “picked up”
following a release-conditions violation. Id. at 407 n.1, 410.

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Samuels argues that Litzau and Shimota are inapposite because they involved a
defendant obstructing an arrest, whereas Officer Johnson “was not effecting an arrest at the
time Samuels was deemed to have obstructed [him].” Samuels argues that the district court
therefore erred when it concluded that his resistance to Officer Johnson’s instruction s
amounted to obstruction of legal process because the officer’s “commands to walk to [his]
squad car” were “separate and apart from [his] official duties.” We disagree.
In Litzau, the defendant committed obstruction of legal process when he resisted a
potentially warrantless arrest based on a release -conditions violation. Id. at 407 & n.1. In
Shimota, the defendant -driver’s obstruction occurred when she resisted an officer’s
attempts to investigate whether she was under the influence of alcohol. 875 N.W.2d at 365.
Similarly, here, Samuels resisted Officer Johnson’s attempts to question him and, while
Officer Johnson was not mandated by law to question Samuels, the officer was nonetheless
acting under his official duties by attempting to investigate Samuels. Cf. State v. Wick, 331
N.W.2d 769, 771 (Minn. 1983) (“[W]hile a defendant would have a right to resist an officer
in order to defend himself . . . against unjustified bodily attack, assaultive conduct is not
justifiable solely on the ground that the officer s are violating the d efendant’s fourth
amendment rights . . . . ”); State v. Diedrich , 410 N.W.2d 20, 23 (Minn. App. 1987)
(affirming obstructing-legal-process conviction where officer detained, but did not arrest,
intoxicated passenger of a pulled -over car, stating that “ whether the trooper was lawfully
taking [the passenger] into custody by placing her in the patrol car or not is not a defense
to the charge of obstructing legal process”).

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We conclude that the district court ’s finding that Officer Johnson was engaged in
the performance of his official duties was not clearly erroneous. Samuels provides no
authority to support a contrary conclusion. Viewed in the light most favorable to the
verdict, we conclude that sufficient evidence supports his conviction of obstructing legal
process.
Affirmed.