MN Supreme Court: Giving wife drugs to hide is not 'selling'
The Minnesota Supreme Court has ruled that giving someone drugs to hide from police does not constitute a "sale" of drugs.
The ruling allows Abshir Abtidon Barrow to withdraw a guilty plea he made in 2011 after police pulled over a car he was riding in and found cocaine Barrow had given to his wife to hide.
Rice County Drug Task Force members had suspected Barrow of selling crack from his home in Faribault, Minn., according to court filings. After police pulled over the car in which he was riding, they searched Barrow and found .7 grams of crack. Barrow's wife told another agent that she'd hidden a 2.1 gram package of cocaine inside her shirt at Barrow's request.
Barrow's wife later told police that she'd hidden the drugs because she was scared of him. Barrow later told investigators that he purchased the cocaine in Rochester, Minn., and that his wife hadn't been involved.
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The court accepted a guilty plea of third-degree sale of a narcotic from Barrow and dismissed two other counts. He was sentenced to 15 months of prison and entered the Minnesota Correctional Facility in St. Cloud in June 2011, according to state records.
In May 2013, Barrow filed a petition to withdraw his guilty plea because he hadn't given up possession of the drugs, as is required in the statutory definition of sale.
The petition was denied without an evidentiary hearing, and the state Court of Appeals affirmed the denial in 2014.
The Supreme Court decision rules that Barrow giving his wife the drugs didn't qualify as a "give-away" under the "sale" statute "because Barrow did not admit that he gave away his interest in the cocaine."
Because it doesn't meet the requirements of the term sale under state law, the court ruled that Barrow should be allowed to withdraw the guilty plea.
"The court should not accept a guilty plea 'unless the record supports the conclusion that the defendant actually committed an offense at least as serious as the crime to which he is pleading guilty,'" according to the decision.
The decision by Chief Justice Lorie Gildea reversed the earlier courts' rejection of Barrow's petition and sends the case back to district court. A request for comment from Barrow's public defender was not immediately returned.