Hennepin County prosecutor calls for Edgar Barrientos-Quintana's murder conviction to be overturned in court

MINNEAPOLIS — Hennepin County District Attorney Mary Moriarty joins the call to overturn Edgar Barrientos-Quintana’s 2009 murder conviction.

In 2009, Barrientos-Quintana was charged and convicted of the premeditated murder of 18-year-old Jesse Mickelson. The teenager was shot to death in his neighbor's driveway in Minneapolis in October 2008. Barrientos-Quintana is currently serving a life sentence without parole.

In August, after a three-year investigation into the case, the Conviction Review Unit of the Minnesota Attorney General's Office recommended that the conviction be overturned and the charges dropped.

In a press conference on Monday, Moriarty's office filed a court motion agreeing with the recommendation.

“As the Attorney General's CRU found, prosecutors in that office and investigators with the Minneapolis Police Department ignored the obvious evidence before them and failed to follow known best practices to convict the man they believed was responsible for the murder,” Moriarty said.

The Conviction Review Unit said it investigated Barrientos-Quintana's alibi, which said he was in the Maplewood area, not Minneapolis, at the time of the shooting. Surveillance video from Cub Foods in east St. Paul shows he was there 33 minutes before the shooting, the unit said.

Phone records, which the unit says were not presented at trial, supported his testimony that he was at his girlfriend's Maplewood apartment 27 minutes after the shooting. The unit says Barrientos-Quintana could not have traveled to the crime scene and back in less than an hour. The jury reportedly did not hear that evidence.

Moriarty said the unit's report also shows there was no physical evidence, fingerprints, DNA or weapons linking Barrientos to the crime.

“Several witnesses identified someone other than the shooter early on,” Moriarty said when discussing the report. “MPD investigators used suggestive and coercive interview techniques on juvenile witnesses to get them to identify Mr. Barrientos-Quintana or change their descriptions to match Mr. Barrientos-Quintana's appearance that day.”

In August, Barrientos-Quintana filed a motion for a post-conviction appeal.

Moriarty says if the court overturns the verdict, her office will drop the charges.

Some of Mickelson's family members were with Moriarty during the press conference and said they supported the decision to overturn Barrientos-Quintana's conviction.

“I want to apologize first and foremost because I have a lot of anger toward a man who had nothing to do with this. And it hurts to know that we were let down because of a wrongful conviction,” said Mickelson's sister Tina Rosebear.

During a separate press conference on Monday, Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O'Hara responded to the development, saying he stands behind the investigators who worked on the case.

“I am concerned that a convicted murderer will be released based only on a reinterpretation of old evidence and not on the existence of new facts,” he said.

Anna McGinn represents Edgar Barrientos-Quintana, now 41 years old.

“We are gratified that both the District Attorney's Office and the Attorney General's Office believe that our client Edgar and the victim's family suffered a terrible miscarriage of justice,” she said.