Analyzing the Minnesota Supreme Court Decision in Brooks

Posted On November 05, 2013 by Daniel Koewler
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We pride ourselves on bringing our readers up-to-date, relevant, and educational information regarding Minnesota's DWI laws, along with our experienced analysis.

But, first and foremost, our firm exists to defend drivers charged with DWI. We can't blog every day, on every topic, because our attorneys spend almost every day in court, representing our clients. And, in the end, that's what drove us to become defense attorney's - the desire to help people who ran afoul of Minnesota's convoluted DWI scheme and got arrested for DWI.

Other attorneys blog too - even the really busy ones. And today we'd like to highlight a post by Carol Weissenborn, over at the Minnesota Supreme Court Criminal Blog. Ms. Weissenborn is not only a defense attorney, but also a law professor, and yet she still finds time to post blogs regarding developments at the Minnesota Supreme Court.

She recently published what might be the best analysis of the Brooks decision we've ever seen. You'll want to click that link and read the whole article, but here's an excerpt from the introduction to whet your appetite:

Now I remember why my expectations are low in consent-to-search cases. They end in opinions like the one we got in Brooks. The Court performed a totality of the circumstances analysis. Like many such analyses, it was substantively choppy and composed of parts that did not necessarily follow one from the other so that, if you shuffled the pieces and recombined them, you would wind up with an opinion that was not very different than the one with which you started . . . . the Minnesota Supreme Court had the opportunity to reckon honestly with the nature of coercion in the implied-consent-to-search context but, whether from a failure of inclination or imagination, it did not do so.

Again, please check out the full article here. It's worth your time.