Taquinia Kokela Douglas, petitioner, Appellant,

STATE OF MINNESOTA
IN COURT OF APPEALS
A21-1001

Taquinia Kokela Douglas, petitioner,
Appellant,

vs.

State of Minnesota,
Respondent.

Filed April 18, 2022
Affirmed
Ross, Judge

Hennepin County District Court
File No. 27-CR-17-26795

Cathryn Middlebrook, Chief Appellate Public Defender, John Donovan, Assistant Public
Defender, St. Paul, Minnesota (for appellant)

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

Michael O. Freeman, Hennepin County A ttorney, Adam Petras, Assistant County
Attorney, Annika Beck (certified student attorney), Minneapolis, Minnesota (for
respondent)

Considered and decided by Worke, Pres iding Judge; Ross, Judge; and Larkin,
Judge.
SYLLABUS
Material that was commercially manufact ured even for a lawful purpose but has
been modified to assist a s hoplifter to “defeat[] an electr onic article surveillance system”
constitutes a “device, gear, or instrument” that was “designed” for an unlawful purpose and
therefore supports a conviction under Minnesota Statutes section 609.521(b) (2016).
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OPINION
ROSS, Judge
Police encountered appellant Taquinia Douglas leaving a retail store with concealed,
unpurchased merchandise that was tagged with antitheft sensors wrapped in aluminum foil.
The district court convicted Douglas of possessing a shoplifting device. Douglas
unsuccessfully petitioned for postconviction relief, arguing that because the aluminum foil
was not “designed” to assist in shoplifting, the statute does not criminalize its possession.
We hold that because the aluminum foil was reshaped to wrap the antitheft sensors to avoid
detection by the store’s theft-detection sy stem, the reshaped foil constituted a device
designed to help shoplift or defeat an elec tronic article surveillance system. We therefore
affirm the postconviction court’s decision denying Douglas’s petition.
FACTS
Taquinia Douglas was “shopping” at Th e Buckle in downtown Maple Grove in
October 2017 when employees suspected that she was shoplifting. They contacted police,
who approached Douglas as she exited the store. Police found merchandise from The
Buckle and Victoria’s Secret in her bag. The merchandise was tagged with antitheft
sensors, but the sensors were wrapped in al uminum foil. Wrapping antitheft sensors with
aluminum foil is a method that some technica lly inclined thieves use attempting to defeat
retailers’ electronic antitheft systems. Police learned that Douglas had not paid for the
items, and they arrested her. The state ch arged her with possessing a shoplifting device
under Minnesota Statutes section 609.521(b) (2016), and a jury found her guilty. After the
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district court convicted and sentenced Doug las, she petitioned for postconviction relief.
The district court denied her petition, and she appeals.
ISSUE
Was the aluminum foil that Douglas possessed a “devic e, gear, or instrument
designed to assist in shoplif ting or defeating an electroni c article surveillance system”
under Minnesota Statutes section 609.521(b) (2016)?
ANALYSIS
Douglas challenges the district court’s order denying her petition for postconviction
relief. We review the district court’s denial for an abuse of discretion, determining whether
the factual findings are supported by the re cord and whether the legal conclusions are
sound. Fort v. State , 829 N.W.2d 78, 81–82 (Minn. 20 13). We are persuaded that the
district court correctly denied Douglas’s petition.
Douglas maintains that the district court erroneously denied her petition because it
misconstrued the criminal statute that pr ohibits possessing a shop lifting device. This
presents an issue of statutory interpretation, which is a question of law triggering our de
novo review. State v. Boss , 959 N.W.2d 198, 2 03 (Minn. 2021). We interpret statutes to
determine the legislative intent, and we dete rmine legislative intent from the statute’s
language if it is unambiguous. State v. Wiltgen , 737 N.W.2d 561, 570–71 (Minn. 2007);
see also Minn. Stat. § 645.16 (2020) (directing courts to look only to “the words of a law
in their application to an ex isting situation” when the words are clear and unambiguous).
The parties agree that the shoplifting-device prohibition is unambiguous, but they dispute
the meaning of one of its terms.
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We must decide the statute’s meaning of “designed.” A person commits the offense
of possessing a shoplifting device if she po ssesses “any device, gear, or instrument
designed to assist in shoplifting or defeating an electronic article surveillance system with
intent to use the same to shoplift and th ereby commit theft.” Minn. Stat. § 609.521(b).
Douglas argues that, although the state proved that she intended to use the aluminum foil
to aid her shoplifting, it did not prove the design element because the original manufacturer
designed the foil for food storage and packing, not shoplifting. The argument fails because
it presumes that the statute’s passive construction of the verb phrase, “designed to assist,”
implies the prepositional noun phrase, by the original manufacturer . Nothing in the text
supports that presumption. We will not add words to the statute in a manner that constrains
its contextually broad meaning. And raw mate rial, like thin sheets of aluminum, can be
designed by a manufacturer for one purpose but then molded, shaped, or altered by a user,
including a crafty shoplifter, redesigning it for an altogether different purpose.
We took this interpretive approach more than 30 years ago when we construed an
earlier version of the shoplifting-device statute in State v. Skinner, 403 N.W.2d 912 (Minn.
App. 1987). The adroit defendant in Skinner had torn open a hidden pocket sewn into his
trench coat and in it stashed a car stereo he took from the shelf of a retail store. Id. at 914.
The district court convicted him of violating the shoplifting-device statute, which at the
time required the item to be “specially designed to assist in shoplifting.” Id. (quoting Minn.
Stat. § 609.521 (1984)). We affirmed the conviction because, alth ough the “‘special
design’ was accomplished by a ra ther crude alteration,” the tr ench coat “was nonetheless
‘specially designed’ to assist in shoplifting ju st as [if] the coat [had] been the production
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of a chic boutique with the same purpose in mind.” Id. at 916. Douglas, like Skinner,
designed a shoplifting device.
DECISION
The molded aluminum foil that Douglas possessed was a device designed to assist
her to shoplift or to defeat a store’s electronic article surveillance system under Minnesota
Statutes section 609.521(b).
Affirmed.