State of Minnesota, Respondent,

This opinion is nonprecedential except as provided by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
A22-1611

State of Minnesota,
Respondent,

vs.

Terry Marcell Allen,
Appellant.

Filed September 11, 2023
Affirmed in part, reversed in part, and remanded
Ross, Judge

Stearns County District Court
File No. 73-CR-22-2963

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

Janelle P. Kendall, Stearns County Attorney, River D. Thelen, Assistant County Attorney,
St. Cloud, Minnesota (for respondent)

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

Considered and decided by Worke, Presiding Judge; Ross, Judge; and Bryan, Judge.
NONPRECEDENTIAL OPINION
ROSS, Judge
Terry Allen grabbed his girlfriend’s hair and kicked her in the side after she accused
him of taking her marijuana and searched his bedroom for it. The jury found Allen guilty
of two counts of felony domestic assault and one count of third-degree assault, and the
district court convicted him on all three counts. Allen appeals his convictions, contending
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that the district court erred by admitting expert testimony and the girlfriend’s unredacted
medical records identifying him as her assailant. He also challenges the sufficiency of the
evidence of one of his felony-domestic-assault convictions. He argues finally that the
district court erroneously convicted him on two counts of felony domestic assault. Because
the district court’s evidentiary decisions fall within its discretion or were harmless, and the
evidence supports the conviction, we affirm in part. But because the district court s hould
have entered only one felony-domestic-assault conviction, we reverse in part and remand
for the district court to correct the warrant of commitment.
FACTS
Appellant Terry Allen’s girlfriend, whom we will call Joan in the interest of privacy,
reported to police in April 2022 that Allen assaulted her by grabbing her hair, holding her
neck, and kicking her. The state charged Allen with two counts of felony domestic assault
and one count of third-degree assault, and the case proceeded to a jury trial. The prosecutor
asked the court for a pretrial ruling to admit Joan’s medical records, which included a
reference to her identifying Allen as her assailant. The prosecutor also asked permission to
call Scott Miller, the executive director of the Domestic Abus e Intervention Program, as
an expert witness to testify to counterintuitive victim behaviors. The district court allowed
the medical records but required the state to redact them to exclude any assailant-
identification reference, and it allowed Miller’s expert testimony over Allen’s argument
that the testimony would not be helpful to the jury.
Joan testified at trial to the circumstances of the incident. She recounted that she
met Allen in 2019 and that the two became engaged in 2020. They ended their engagement
3
in 2021 but the relationship continued, on and off. She testified that Allen was controlling,
that he used physical force against her during arguments, and that he threatened her and
stole from her during the relationship.
Joan had been staying with Allen when the incident occurred. She awoke to find her
marijuana missing, and she suspected that Allen took it. She ransacked his room searching
for it. Allen returned home with groceries, and she asked him about the marijuana. S he
testified, “The nicer I asked, the more upset he got.” She said that Allen was angry about
the mess she made to his room. He grabbed her hair, ordered her to clean the room, and
told her to put away the groceries he bought. She testified that he dragged her through t he
hallway by her hair and kicked her on the left side of her body. She said she heard her
bones break. She told Allen that she couldn’t breathe, and he kicked her again. Then he
pulled her by her hair into the bedroom and continued kicking her, demanding that she
clean the room. She asked him to start the washing machine. She said that he at first refused,
standing in the doorway with his arms crossed. When Allen eventually left to start the
laundry, Joan escaped from the home. Joan did not immediately seek treatment or report
the incident to police. She went to her storage unit to store her personal items and then she
went to the hospital. Joan at first told hospital staff that she fell from a tree. She later said
that Allen had assaulted her, and she asked staff to report the assault to police. Medical
staff determined that Joan suffered a fractured rib, a punctured lung, and bruised
extremities.
Allen’s landlord testified. She said that she saw Joan the morning of the incident,
and that she appeared to be waiting for a ride.
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The state moved to admit Joan’s medical records without redactions as a prior
consistent statement. T he court granted the motion and admitted the unredacted records
over Allen’s objection. A police officer testified that he had also spoken with Joan at the
hospital. In recordings of that conversation, Joan identified Allen as her assailant. The
officer photographed Joan’s injuries at the hospital, and the photographs were admitted
into evidence.
The state called Scott Miller as an expert witness to testify about counterintuitive
victim behavior s. The district court allowed Miller to testify as an expert over Allen’s
renewed objection. Miller testified about the mindset of batterers and the challenges that
victims face under the control of a batterer. He described different tactics that men who
batter women use to control them, including threats, isolation, and economic abuse. He
explained why a victim of abuse may delay reporting abuse or may not report abuse and
why a victim may not end a relationship with an abuser.
The jury found Allen guilty of all three charged offenses. Allen asked the court to
execute his 21- month prison sentence, and the court sentenced him on only the third-
degree-assault count after the state acknowledged that the charges all arose from the same
behavioral incident. Allen’s warrant of commitment reflects a conviction of all three
offenses.
Allen appeals.

5
DECISION
Allen makes four principal arguments on appeal. He argues first that the district
court improperly allowed Miller to testify as an expert witness, contending that the
testimony was unhelpful and prejudicial. He also argues that Joan’s unredacted medical
records should not have been admitted under the residual hearsay exception. He questions
the sufficiency of the evidence against him for one of his felony-domestic-assault
convictions. And he argues that his warrant of commitment should be amended to include
convictions of only third-degree assault and one count of felony domestic assault. Only his
last argument prevails.
I
Allen first contends that the district court abused its discretion by admitting Miller’s
expert testimony. We review evidentiary rulings for an abuse of discretion when the
evidence was objected to at trial, see State v. Vue, 606 N.W.2d 719, 724 (Minn. App. 2000),
and we review unobjected-to errors for plain error, State v. Word, 755 N.W.2d 776, 781
(Minn. App. 2008). Allen and the state dispute which standard applies here because they
disagree about the scope of Allen’s objection to the expert testimony. But resolving this
dispute is unnecessary because, applyi ng even the lower standard of abuse of discretion,
Allen’s challenge fails.
Allen contends that the district court should have excluded Miller’s expert testimony
as both unhelpful to the jury and unfairly prejudicial. He argues that the testimony was not
helpful because Joan never exhibited counterintuitive behaviors requiring expert testimony
because the reasons she gave for her delay in reporting the incident were understandable
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to the jury. Expert opinion testimony must be helpful to be admissible. Minn. R. Evid. 702.
And expert opinion testimony is unhelpful when it would not aid the jury to reach a
conclusion. State v. Obeta, 796 N.W.2d 282, 289 (Minn. 2011). Expert testimony on
battered-woman syndrome, which is analogous to the type of testimony offered here about
patterns of domestic abuse, has been admissible when it “could help the jury understand
behavior that might otherwise undermine the complainant’s credibility.” State v.
Grecinger, 569 N.W.2d 189, 196 (Minn. 1997). In Grecinger, this meant that the testimony
helped explain why the victim returned to the relationship after being assaulted, gave
contradictory accounts about her injuries, delayed pursuing prosecution, and recanted
statements she had made about the abuse. Id. at 195. We can consider Miller’s testimony
in this framework.
Given the district court’s discretion, we believe that Joan’s actions were sufficiently
counterintuitive for the district court to conclude that Miller’s testimony would be helpful
for reasons like those considered in Grecinger. It is true that her delay in reporting the
assault to police was not particularly long—only about one day passed between the incident
and the report. But the jury might think the delay counterintuitive to a victim’s actions. The
evidence also showed that she remained in her relationship with Allen despite her
testimony that he used control and physical force against her. And she had changed her
story, first telling hospital staff she fell from a tree and later accusing Allen of assault.
Under these circumstances, we hold that the district court acted within its discretion by
treating Miller’s opinion testimony as helpful to explain counterintuitive victim behaviors.
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Allen maintains that Miller’s testimony nevertheless unfairly prejudiced him by
including broad generalizations about “men who batter” and victims. Even helpful expert
testimony may be inadmissible “ if its probative value is substantially outweighed by the
danger of unfair prejudice.” Minn. R. Evid. 403. Expert testimony suggesting that a
defendant is guilty based on generalizations placing him in a class of offenders, or based
on improper stereotyping, should therefore be excluded as inadmissible. See Vue, 606
N.W.2d at 723 (holding that any probative value from expert testimony was improperly
“based on generalizations that appellant is part of a ‘guilty class’ of spouse-abusers, and
the victim is part of a ‘victim class’ of abused women”); State v. Williams, 525 N.W.2d
538, 548 (Minn. 1994) (holding that evidence was inadmissible when officers testified that
drug couriers act in a specific way and the jury was encouraged to infer that defendant was
a drug courier because she fit the profile). This is a close question here.
Allen argues that he was prejudiced because Miller relied on generalizations about
batterers and victims and improperly relied on gender stereotypes, pointing to Miller’s
testimony about “men who batter” and his exclusively referring to perpetrators as male and
victims as female. He also highlights Miller’s testimony that battering is a “socially
constructive problem, a learned behavior that they have taken on about what they get to do
and how they get to be as men.” He compares Miller’s testimony to the expert testimony
that we held was inadmissible in State v. Vue. In Vue, the district court admitted the state’s
expert’s testimony about Hmong culture and about male-female relationships in traditional
Hmong marriages. 606 N.W.2d at 721. We reversed Vue’s conviction because we held that
the expert’s testimony impermissibly introduced cultural stereotyping to imply Vue was
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guilty. Id. at 723. And we emphasized the state’s reliance on Vue’s ethnicity in our holding.
Id. Allen contends that Miller’s testimony here similarly implied that Allen was guilty
because he belonged to a class of male batterers. His contention is not meritless. Miller’s
testimony ostensibly about counterintuitive victim behavior drifted close to
characterizations of offender behavior and motivations, an area that is not necessary to help
the jury understand matters of uncommon understanding. But we are satisfied that the
testimony emphasized the reasons why victims may fail to report abuse or may otherwise
act against a jury’s expectations about an abuse victim. The references to men who batter
put these concerns in perspective. They arguably provided background information for the
jury to understand his conclusions, which were appropriately tied to the reason for
admitting his testimony. We are concerned that Miller’s testimony at times arguably
blurred the line between improper offender generalizations and explanations of victim
behavior. But given the high (“substantially outweigh”) standard of inadmissibility and our
deference to the district court’s broad discretion in evidentiary decisions, we will not
reverse on rule 403 grounds. Again, this is a close case. Our opinion should not be read as
endorsing all of Miller’s testimony; we hold only that the district court did not abuse its
discretion by failing to exclude the testimony as unfairly prejudicial.
We are not persuaded otherwise by Allen’s reliance on our nonprecedential opinion
in State v. Lucas, No. A21-0604, 2022 WL 2912030 (Minn. App. July 25, 2022), rev.
denied (Minn. Oct. 18, 2022). In Lucas we recently addressed a challenge to the same
expert witness’s testimony, and we held that his “testimony about the difference between
male and female perpetrators of domestic violence corresponds to the improper character
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evidence discussed in Williams and it improperly invoked gender stereotypes to support
impermissible inferences like the testimony deemed inadmissible in Vue.” 2022 WL
2912030, at *6 (emphasis added). The focus of our Lucas reasoning, leading to our holding
that Miller’s testimony was impermissibly prejudicial, was Miller’s “lengthy” testimony
about the differences in perpetrator intent between the sexes, including that male
perpetrators of domestic abuse feel entitled to punish their victims while female
perpetrators of abuse typically intend to stop abuse from their male partners. Id. We also
emphasized that Miller testified about these stereotypes “without connecting that testimony
to the counterintuitive behavior of domestic-abuse victims.” Id. Here, Miller’s testimony
did not contain the stereotypes about male and female perpetrators that we held
impermissible in Lucas. And although the background information he provided about the
characteristics of batterers and victims again closely approached the foul line, Miller
connected that background testimony to reasons why victims may exhibit counterintuitive
behaviors after an incident of abuse.
Allen also challenges attributes of Miller’s testimony and the state’s reliance on his
testimony that go to the weight, rather than content, of the testimony. He asks us to consider
Miller’s credentials, alleging that his theories are not peer -reviewed, and he points to the
prosecutor’s heavy use of the testimony in closing argument. Allen was free to challenge
Miller’s credentials in cross-examination and to highlight his credibility concerns to the
jury in closing argument. The factors goin g to the weight of Miller’s testimony are
insufficient for us to hold that the district court abused its discretion.
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II
Allen unconvincingly maintains that we should reverse his conviction because the
district court allowed the state to introduce Joan’s unredacted medical records identifying
him as her assailant. The district court modified its pretrial ruling that only the redacted
records would be admitted, citing Joan’s consistent testimony and allowing the reports
under the residual hearsay exception. We review the district court’s evidentiary ruling for
an abuse of discretion, considering both the alleged error and any resulting prejudice. State
v. Amos, 658 N.W.2d 201, 203 (Minn. 2003). For the following reasons, we agree with
Allen that the district c ourt abused its discretion by admitting the unredacted records, but
we decline to reverse his convictions because the error was harmless.
The district court should not have admitted the medical records unredacted.
Statements to medical professionals made for medical diagnosis or treatment are not
generally inadmissible under the hearsay rule, Minn. R. Evid. 803(4), but statements that
identify an assailant are typically inadmissible under the medical-records exception. See
State v. Robinson, 718 N.W.2d 400, 404 (Minn. 2006). The district court allowed Joan’s
unredacted medical records under the residual hearsay exception:
A statement not specifically covered by rule 803 or 804 but
having equivalent circumstantial guarantees of
trustworthiness, is not excluded by the hearsay rule, if the court
determines that (A) the statement is offered as evidence of a
material fact; (B) the statement is more probative on the point
for which it is offered than any other evidence which the
proponent can procure through reasonable efforts; and (C) the
general purposes of these rules and the interests of justice will
best be served by admission of the statement into evidence.

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Minn. R. Evid. 807. The medical records here fail to meet rule 807’s requirement that the
statement be more probative than any other available evidence of the same fact for which
the statement is offered.
The medical reports reference Joan’s assailant six times, ranging from vague
statements—that she was “admitted medically after a fairly severe assault from her
boyfriend”—to specific ones that named Allen directly— “[s]he had been with her partner
Terry for 4 years this is the person who assaulted her prior to this admission.” But by the
time these reports were offered, Joan had already testified identifying Allen as her assailant.
Because Joan’s direct testimony was more probative than her hearsay statements
introduced through the medical reports, the unredacted reports were not properly admitted
under the rule 807 residual hearsay exception. But for the same reason, the district court’s
erroneous admission of the unredacted records was harmless. The records were probative
of identity, but Joan had identified Allen to police after the assault, she never recanted her
identification, and she reiterated it at trial. The jury heard Joan directly identify Allen and
saw body-worn camera footage in which Joan identified Allen as her assailant before the
district court admitted the medical reports. The additional identification of Allen in those
reports did not impact the verdict, and we disagree with Allen that the records improperly
bolstered Joan’s credibility.
III
Allen argues that the evidence was insufficient to prove that he committed domestic
assault by intending to cause Joan fear. The state proved Allen’s intent to cause fear by
circumstantial evidence, and so we review its sufficiency in two steps: we first identify the
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facts proved at trial by accepting facts consistent with the verdict as true and by rejecting
inconsistent facts, and we then examine whether the facts proved are consistent with any
rational hypothesis other than guilt. State v. Andersen, 784 N.W.2d 320, 329 (Minn. 2010).
The circumstances proved here point only to Allen’s guilt.
Allen argues that the state did not prove that he intended to cause Joan fear of harm.
A person is guilty of domestic assault when he “commits an act with intent to cause fear in
another of immediate bodily harm or death.” Minn. Stat. § 609.2242, subd. 1(1) (2020).
The offense is a felony when the offender’s criminal history meets a specified level. Id.
This is a specific-intent offense, requiring evidence that Allen specifically intended to
cause Joan fear. See State v. Fleck, 810 N.W.2d 303, 308–09 (Minn. 2012). To commit a
general-intent crime like assault with intent to cause harm, in comparison, the actor must
intend only the act and not the result. Id. at 309. “Intent can be inferred from the idea that
a person intends the natural consequences of his or her actions.” Nelson v. State, 880
N.W.2d 852, 860 (Minn. 2016) (quotation omitted). Allen maintains that the state proved
only general intent—that he intended to act by kicking Joan—and not specific intent—that
he intended to cause her fear of harm.
Joan’s testimony reveals the circumstances the state proved at trial. Allen was angry
because Joan messed up his room during a search for marijuana. Allen’s anger increased
as Joan questioned him about taking her marijuana. Allen grabbed her hair and ordered her
to pick up the room. Allen became increasingly aggressive and violent as she resisted.
Allen dragged her through the hallway. He kicked her. He yelled at her to “Get up. Get up.
Sit down. Take a rest and breathe to finish cleaning up the room.” He stood, arms crossed
13
in the doorway after she asked him to start the laundry, at first refusing to go. Joan fled the
home after Allen went to begin the laundry. These circumstances are consistent with the
jury’s conclusion that Allen intended to cause Joan fear, and we hold that they are
inconsistent with any alternative hypothesis, including the one advanced by Allen (that he
intended to cause Joan harm, not fear). His physically violent actions clearly demonstrate
that he intended to harm her, but his yelling and intimidating posturing in the doorway, in
context, can be interpreted only as intending to put, or keep, Joan in fear of continued
physical injury. See Nelson, 880 N.W.2d at 860. The evidence supports the element.
We are not persuaded to a different conclusion by Allen’s highlighting the state’s
closing argument, where the prosecutor argued only that Allen’s kicking Joan was enough
to show both domestic assault by harm and domestic assault by fear. Our focus is on
whether the state offered enough evidence to prove the element, not whether the state
pointed the jury to the right evidence.
IV
Allen argues last that he was improperly convicted of two counts of felony domestic
assault contrary to Minnesota Statutes section 609.04 (2020). We review de novo whether
a conviction violates section 609.04. State v. Bonkowske, 957 N.W.2d 437, 443 (Minn.
App. 2021). A person with a requisite criminal history commits felony domestic assault
when he “(1) commits an act with intent to cause fear in another of immediate bodily harm
or death; or (2) intentionally inflicts or attempts to inflict bodily harm upon another.” Minn.
Stat. § 609.2242, subd s. 1, 4 (2020). Allen was charged with and found guilty of two
separate counts of domestic assault based on both theories of criminal liability. A defendant
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can be convicted of a charged crime or of an included offense, but not both, Minn. Stat.
§ 609.04, subd. 1, and the section “bars multiple convictions under different sections of a
criminal statute for acts committed during a single behavioral incident.” State v. Jackson ,
363 N.W.2d 758, 760 (Minn. 1985). The state conceded during Allen’s sentencing hearing
that “this was one behavioral incident,” and the convictions are undisputedly different
sections of the same criminal statute.
The state argues for a different result on appeal after conceding at sentencing that
the offenses were one behavioral incident. We consider time, place, and criminal objective
when deciding whether offenses comprise one behavioral incident. State v. Bertsch , 707
N.W.2d 660, 664 (Minn. 2006). The offenses here depended on the same set of facts at the
same time in the same place. We reverse in part and remand for the district court to correct
the warrant of commitment to reflect only one felony-domestic-assault conviction.
Affirmed in part, reversed in part, and remanded.