Sentencing Guidelines Commission advances package of rerankings, criminal‑history changes after comprehensive review

ST. PAUL, Minn. — The Sentencing Guidelines Commission on Aug. 11 heard the final synthesis of a two‑year comprehensive review and stakeholder outreach and endorsed a staff‑led package of changes that would rerank certain offenses and change how criminal history and custody status are handled in sentencing calculations.

Commission Chair Kelly Mitchell, opening the work session, framed the day as a culminating review: “Today is the day when it all comes together and we get to see the sum total of our work and and decide, is this the direction?” she said, urging commissioners to focus on the package’s substance and remaining gaps.

The package the commission discussed includes: proposed rerankings for a subset of vehicle‑related homicide and great bodily harm offenses and several assault offenses; a proposal to move “failure to register as a predatory offender” off the predatory‑offender grid and onto the standard grid (with distinct placements for first and subsequent offenses); and several criminal‑history reforms including removing juvenile adjudications from the adult criminal‑history score, shortening the decay window for prior convictions, and converting custody status from an element of the criminal‑history score into a separate durational add‑on to the guideline box.

Nut graf: The commission’s work is driven by research and broad stakeholder engagement, including 164 participants across two rounds of outreach. Staff told commissioners that the changes are intended to make the guidelines easier to apply, reduce some sources of disparity and error, and better align presumptive severity with practice; staff will run impact estimates and revise language before any final commission vote.

Commission staff presented three intertwined bodies of evidence that shaped the proposals. Management analysis staff summarized the stakeholder engagement (practitioners, victims’ advocates, people with lived experience, probation and corrections staff and others), and Robina Institute researchers reported interviews with prosecutors, public defenders and dispositional advisers in urban and rural districts. The researchers found consistent concerns about complexity, the treatment of out‑of‑state records, and departure practice. Julie Laskrinsky, research director at the Robina Institute, summarized interviews about high‑departure offenses and said practitioners frequently described failure‑to‑register cases as nondeliberate or driven by instability—facts that prosecutors and judges often treat differently from the statutory mandatory minimums.

“We heard repeatedly that probation and noncustodial tools are limited by staffing and service gaps, and that departure practice sometimes signals misalignment between statutes, the guidelines and local charging,” Laskrinsky told the commission.

The criminal‑history proposals drew significant attention. Under staff’s recommendation, juvenile adjudications that do not result in adult convictions would be removed from the adult criminal‑history score. Custody status—whether a defendant was serving a sentence or under supervision at the time of the new offense—would no longer add points to the criminal history calculation but instead produce a fixed durational increase (a “custody status column”) appended to the box on the grid. Staff said that approach preserves a consequence for offending while in supervision but avoids pushing many cases across the dispositional (probation/prison) threshold.

The commission also discussed reducing the window during which priors are counted (the “decay” period) from the current 15 years for felonies and 10 for misdemeanors; staff recommended 10 and 7, respectively. Commissioners and several members of the public urged attention to consistency with other state policies (expungement/pardon timelines) and urged staff to supply comparative data and the projected bed‑impact before a final vote.

Researchers also presented evidence on shifting incarceration rates. Ethan Ellis of the Humphrey School/Robina Institute used a quasi‑experimental analysis of the 2019 partial‑custody status point change and found that reducing custody‑triggered commitments raised short‑term reoffense during the period someone otherwise would have been incarcerated (the “incapacitation window”) but produced little to no increase in medium‑term recidivism once released. “This policy did in fact reduce incarceration, and we do see that the lack of incapacitation leads to a short‑term increase in reoffense rates,” Ellis summarized. “However, when we look beyond the baseline incarceration period, we find no evidence of medium‑term increases in reoffense.”

Public comment and several commissioners stressed the need to link guideline changes to clear policy goals and to public safety evidence. Anna Hall, a public defender at the Legal Rights Center, told commissioners she supported several steering‑committee proposals but urged caution and more research before upranking offenses. “When you set presumptive sentences, there are real people who learn something about what the state of Minnesota thinks of them,” Hall said. “Keep in mind the message presumptive and mandatory terms send to people and communities.”

Action and next steps: Commissioners did not take final votes on any substantive changes at the Aug. 11 session. They directed staff to: compute bed‑impact and sentencing‑distribution estimates for the proposed rerankings and criminal‑history changes; draft statutory and guideline text to implement the custody‑status durational approach; and return at the next meeting with refined language and impact analysis that can support a formal vote. Chair Mitchell said the commission will aim to produce a final package for a November vote so it can be sent to the public hearing in December and, if adopted, to the legislature in January.

Ending: Commissioners emphasized that the package remains a work in progress. As one commissioner put it during the afternoon’s “gradients of agreement” activity, the commission had reached substantial consensus on many items but would need staff impact estimates and additional drafting to make final decisions: “We got a lot of common ground today,” Chair Mitchell told members, “and staff will run the numbers and come back with a package.”