Matthias Jacob Gould, petitioner, Appellant,

This opinion is nonprecedential except as provided by
Minn. R. Civ. App. P. 136.01, subd. 1(c).

STATE OF MINNESOTA
IN COURT OF APPEALS
A22-0104

Matthias Jacob Gould, petitioner,
Appellant,

vs.

State of Minnesota,
Respondent.

Filed August 8, 2022
Reversed and remanded
Ross, Judge

St. Louis County District Court
File No. 69DU-CR-19-535

Tayler J. Rahm, Rahm Law, PLLC, Minnetonka, Minnesota (for appellant)

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

Kimberly J. Maki, St. Louis County Attorney, Nathaniel T. Stumme, Anthony Rubin,
Assistant County Attorneys, Duluth, Minnesota (for respondent)

Considered and decided by Slieter, Presiding Judge; Ross, Judge; and Kirk, Judge.
∗
NONPRECEDENTIAL OPINION
ROSS, Judge
A convicted sex offender serving a 144-month prison sentence petitioned for
postconviction relief, challenging his recent guilty plea as invalid due to his alleged lack

∗ Retired judge of the Minnesota Court of Appeals, serving by appointment pursuant to
Minn. Const. art. VI, § 10.
2
of understanding that his guilty plea would result in his imprisonment. The district court
summarily dismissed the petition without an evidentiary hearing after it declared that a
postconviction petitioner bears the “burden to set forth facts in the petition by a fair
preponderance of the evidence” and then rejected the petition by considering his statements
made at the plea hearing. Because the district court applied the wrong legal standard, and
because the petition, supporting documents, and the record do not conclusively show that
Gould is entitled to no relief, we reverse and remand for an evidentiary hearing.
FACTS
The state charged 18- year-old Matthias Gould with first -degree criminal sexual
conduct and fifth-degree assault because he allegedly sexually penetrated a 12-year-old girl
and struck the girl’s mother with his backp ack when she confronted him about it. Gould
agreed to a straight plea on both charges in March 2020 with no sentencing deal. His plea
petition summarized the arrangement as, “Plead to Count I and II; PSI; Defendant will
argue for a dispositional departure.”
At the plea hearing Gould testified that he received the petition and signed it.
Gould’s attorney then questioned him about his understanding of the plea’s consequences:
Q: Today, Matt hias, you’ll be pleading guilt [y] to Count 1 and Count 2, as you
recall, and there will be a PSI. And then you and I are going to argue for a departure
at sentencing. You understand that, correct?
A: Yes.
Q: And not a part of the plea agreement but a part of the plan, we’re going to attempt
to get you to treatment, through Mr. Pogatchnik in Probation, up at [the treatment
center]. Correct?
A: Yes.
3
Q: And our hope is that you can avoid potential prison time by doing well in
treatment on a pretrial status, correct?
A: Yes.
Q: And that’s your hope, correct?
A: Yes.
The district court followed up: “And then while at [the treatment center], he’ll participate
-- Mr. Gould then, all the, you know, programming that’s made available to you at this
time. Okay? And clearly, that would be in your best interests to do so.”
Gould failed in treatment. The PSI report recommended the presumptive guidelines
sentence of 144 months’ imprisonment. At Gould’s sentencing hearing, his attorney moved
for a downward dispositional departure and shed light on Gould’s lack of comprehension
related to the guilty plea and the potential for prison: “He thought he was in the clear. He
didn’t think he was going to prison, even though I’ve routinely . . . told him that. The
implications of that he doesn’t get, even though he’s told . . . . He will nod . . . . But he
doesn’t get it, like a young kid would.” The district court denied Gould’s motion and
sentenced him to 144 months in prison.
Within two weeks after the sentencing Gould petitioned for postconviction relief.
He asserted that he did not intelligently enter his guilty plea and that he received ineffective
assistance from his attorney. He submitted five affidavits and six exhibits to support his
allegation that he had a previous traumatic brain injury, he has very low cognitive ability,
he had very little contact with his attorney before the guilty plea, and his attorney was
4
aware that Gould needed family members to explain things to him but failed to include
them in substantive discussions before he pleaded guilty.
The district court summarily denied Gould’s petition without holding an evidentiary
hearing based on its factual conclusion that Gould understood the consequences of his
guilty plea and that “[e]ven if his attorney was not as communicative as the family or the
Petitioner would have liked, he worked out a reasonable deal.”
Gould appeals.
DECISION
Gould challenges the district court’s summary denial of his petition for
postconviction relief. We review a summary denial of a postconviction petition for an
abuse of discretion, which occurs when a district court bases its decision on an erroneous
view of the law, flawed logic, or factual findings not supported in the record. Andersen v.
State, 913 N.W.2d 417, 422 (Minn. 2018). The district court employed an erroneous view
of the law, requiring reversal.
The district court rejected Gould’s petition without a hearing under an erroneous
legal understanding. Although the controlling statute requires the district court to hold an
evidentiary hearing on a postconviction petit ion “[u]nless the petition and the files and
records of the proceeding conclusively show that the petitioner is entitled to no relief,”
Minn. Stat. § 590.04, subd. 1 (2020), the district court believed that the petitioner bears the
“burden to set forth facts in the petition by a fair preponderance of the evidence.” The
district court cited State v. Ecker for this incorrect legal proposition. 524 N.W.2d 712, 715–
16 (Minn. 1994). What Ecker actually says is, “The petitioner seeking postconviction relief
5
has the burden of establishing the facts alleged in the petition by a fair preponderance of
the evidence.” Id. The Ecker court accurately stated the standard to be applied to a fact-
weighing inquiry during the evidentiary hearing on the petitioner ’s claims, nearly quoting
and then citing Minnesota Statutes section 590.04, subdivision 3 (1992). Id. at 716. The
burden restated in Ecker is best understood in that statutory context: “A verbatim record of
any hearing shall be made and kept. Unless otherwise ordered by the court, the burden of
proof of the facts alleged in the petition shall be upon the petitioner to establish the facts
by a fair preponderance of the evidence.” Minn. Stat. § 590.04, subd. 3 ( 2020). It is only
in the context of directing “the court [to] promptly set an early hearing on the petition and
response thereto” that the statute then directs the court to “make findings of fact and
conclusions of law” on the matter. Id., subd. 1. By framing the weight-of-evidence standard
as a burden of postconviction pleading rather than an evidentiary burden of proof for a
hearing, the district court set the stage for a prehearing weighing of the evidence, which it
then undertook, wrongly.
Compounding this error, the district court weighed evidence without treating the
facts alleged in the petition as true and without construing them in the light most favorable
to the petitioner, as required. B rown v. State , 895 N.W.2d 612, 618 (Minn. 2017). The
district court weighed the evidence without addressing the substance (or even
acknowledging the existence) of the five affidavits and six exhibits that Gould submitted
with his petition to support his allegations that he pleaded guilty without understanding the
consequences and that he was not properly advised or represented by counsel. The district
court similarly failed to address or even mention the statements that Gould’s attorney made
6
at sentencing, which were consistent with Gould’s later claim that he always believed that
he would avoid prison by pleading guilty regardless of whether he succeeded in treatment.
Rather than address any of this evidence, the district court based its decision entirely on
Gould’s statements made during the plea hearing, finding that “[t]he record is void of
anything” that supports Gould’s claim of having been confused or having not intelligently
entered his plea. The district court therefore compounded its improper decision to weigh
facts without a hearing by failing to actually weigh the relevant, asserted facts.
We recognize that Gould’s plea- hearing statements, made under oath and quoted
above, constitute evidence that bear on whether, as a matter of fact, he understood the
consequences of his plea. But they cannot be considered in a vacuum at the postconviction
pleading stage, in which the petition’s factual allegations are supposed to be accepted as
true. We of course have affirmed summary denial of a postconviction petition because of
a petitioner’s plea-hearing testimony. See, e.g., Williams v. State, 760 N.W.2d 8, 15 (Minn.
App. 2009), rev. denied (Minn. Apr. 21, 2009). But we have done so “[b]ecause [petitioner]
did not submit any factual support for her allegations and her allegations are directly
refuted by her own testimony.” Id. This is not the case here, where Gould did submit factual
support for his allegations and his allegations are not directly refuted by his own testimony.
In addition to the district court’s legal and factual fallacies, it also based its decision
on a logical fallacy. It referenced Gould’s “Yes” answer to his attorney’s question at the
plea hearing, “And our hope is that you can avoid potential prison time by doing well in
treatment on a pretrial status, correct?” It then dismissed Gould’s contention that his low
cognitive functioning resulted in any misunderstanding about whether he could receive a
7
probationary sentence without first succeeding in treatment. It did so on what it believed
to be a certain principle of formal logic: “[Even] someone with the cognitive ability of a
14-year-old understands that when told if you do x (i.e., participate in treatment) then y
(avoid prison) could happen. This of course logically means that if you do not do x then y
will not happen.” This reasoning follows a classic propositional fallacy, not a formal logical
truth. It is true that this statement, if x then y, makes certain the statement, not y therefore
not x. For example, accepting as true that , if you eat 50 donuts daily you will become
overweight, necessarily also means that if you did not become overweight you must not
have been eating 50 donuts daily. But the district court is wrong that the statement, if x then
y, makes certain the statement, not x therefore not y. This is a fallacy. The first can be true
and the second false; accepting that by eating 50 donuts daily you will become overweight
does not (and should not) lead you to believe that if you do not eat 50 donuts daily you
certainly will not become overweight—a daily gallon of ice cream, among other
indulgences, could prompt the same result. The district court errantly reasoned that,
because Gould understood that he could avoid prison by doing well in treatment, he
certainly also understood that failing in treatment meant he could not avoid prison. Again,
Gould’s testimony might support the state’s position that Gould understood that failing in
treatment meant that he could not avoid prison, but it does not certainly establish that fact,
and it therefore does not directly refute his petition allegations.
We are satisfied that this is not a case suited for summary dismissal. Taking the
affidavits and exhibits as true, drawing favorable inferences from the statements made by
Gould’s attorney at sentencing about Gould’s intractable but mistaken understanding that
8
his plea would not result in a prison sentence, recognizing that the defense attorney,
prosecutor, and district court did not precisely clarify Gould’s understanding of (or capacity
to understand) the consequences of pleading guilty, the record do es not “conclusively
show” that Gould is entitled to no postconviction relief. The affidavits and other evidence
indicate that Gould suffered a traumatic brain injury, that he has the cognitive functioning
of a 14-year-old, that he relies heavily on his grandfather to process information and make
decisions, that he genuinely informed his grandparents immediately before sentencing that
he was “ready to come home,” and that his own attorney believed that Gould consistently
thought that by pleading guilty he would avoid prison but counseled him to take a straight
plea anyway. The submissions justify a hearing regarding both theories of relief.
We of course do not offer any opinion as to how the evidence ought to be weighed
or what findings should result. Nor do we intend to imply whether Gould’s petition should
ultimately prevail once the evidence has been presented and tested. We hold only that the
pleadings justify an evidentiary hearing, and we remand for that purpose.
Reversed and remanded.