Case Story: Fighting against a charge of exploiting a vulnerable adult

DISCLAIMER:

CASE RESULTS DEPEND ON A VARIETY OF FACTORS UNIQUE TO EACH CASE. CASE RESULTS DO NOT GUARANTEE OR PREDICT A SIMILAR RESULT IN ANY FUTURE CASE.

As the U.S. Supreme Court has made clear on several occasions, “no union is more profound than marriage.” Whether between a man and a woman, or those of the same sex, marriage is one of the most sacred and protected rights in American law.

And the reason is obvious—when two people decide to spend their lives together, and share belongings and assets, the state should take a back seat when it comes to telling those two people what to do and how to do it.

That’s what this case is about.

Our client and her husband had been married for many years. Due to a mental illness, our client’s husband exhibited some odd behavior, including conduct that at first blush seemed criminal. During this trying time, our client and her husband worked to resolve the issue on their own, but the state couldn’t help but get involved.

And when it did, it unfortunately did more harm than good, eventually leading it to erroneously believing that our client was exploiting her husband—whom they had deemed to be a “vulnerable adult” because of his mental illness.

Wisely, our client kept her mouth shut and retained our firm pre-charge, meaning before the state formally charged her with a crime. We immediately got to work, preparing a defense against the notion that a wife can exploit her husband even when he makes clear he is not being exploited.

It’s a good thing we did, because that’s exactly the way the state charged our client. They argued that she exploited her husband, a vulnerable adult, despite his claim she didn’t. Through our calculated legal and factual maneuvers, however, the state ultimately had no choice but to dismiss the case just days before trial.

Here’s how we did it.

The Charge

Our story begins with our client’s husband setting her truck on fire. With no context, this seemed bad, and the state rightly intervened. It charged the husband with arson and helped our client obtain a protection order against him. But as the case progressed, it became clear something was wrong with our husband’s mind. He hadn’t acted criminally, but because of a mental illness.

So the state dismissed the charge and began to work to unwind the protection order between the two. This seemed like the fair and appropriate thing to do, but something more was going on behind the scenes.

First, given his mental illness, the state designated our client’s husband as a “vulnerable adult.” In Minnesota, this has a specific meaning—basically, it’s a legal “red flag” that indicates that the person has a greater chance of being mistreated than the average person.

Using this, the state turned its focus to our client due to some financial decisions she had made with her husband’s money during this time (or what they regarded as her husband’s money). It didn’t matter to the state that the husband had approved the decisions, or that our client had taken good care of her husband during this time. They simply saw a woman spending joint marital assets in a way they didn’t like and took it upon themselves to intervene.

It started with the state looking at bank records, interviewing the husband, things like that. Then things ramped up when our client was formally asked to sit for an interview with police.

In what is always the right decision, our client respectfully declined and instead hired our firm to represent her interests pre-charge. We obliged, and immediately let the state know our client would not be providing any statements regarding the spending of the assets.

Hellbent on finding criminality where it didn’t exist, the state eventually charged our client with exploitation of a vulnerable adult—the exploitation being the misspending of money the state wrongly believed belonged only to the husband, and the vulnerable adult being the husband.

Luckily, because our client had hired us pre-charge, we were ready for the state’s overreach.

The Defense

Our work can be broken down into two parts: (1) pre-charge work and (2) post-charge work. Together, they provided the path for this case’s successful outcome.

Pre-charge

As noted above, the first thing we almost always do when a client hires us pre-charge is to make sure the client does not speak with law enforcement or any of its investigators. On rare occasions we make an exception, but this was not such a case.

We then met multiple times with our client, the goal being to fully understand every aspect of the case and her relationship with her husband. During these conversations, two things became clear to us: (1) our client had spent joint marital assets, and (2) our client’s husband did not want her to be charged for exploiting him.

These two revelations guided the rest of our approach to the case.

First, we memorialized the husband’s statement that he did not believe our client had committed a crime and that he did not want her to be prosecuted for what she had done. The husband also made clear that our client had permission to spend the money she spent, and that he considered the money to be a joint asset of the marriage.

Next, we began researching the legal landscape of whether the law even allows the charge the state seemed poised to make—specifically, the idea that a wife can exploit a husband by spending joint marital assets with the husband’s knowledge and permission.

It’s a good thing we did both these things, too, because the state eventually did what our client feared when she hired us pre-charge: they formally charged her with the felony offense of exploiting her husband, a vulnerable adult.

Post-charge

Once charged, our defense took two forms, one legal and one factual.

Factually, we argued that it seemed absurd to charge our client with stealing from her husband—the vulnerable adult—when the husband himself didn’t consider it stealing at all. It’s the type of government overreach we unfortunately see all too often.

The simple question we kept posing to the prosecutor, and the question we planned to also pose to a potential jury, was this: if the husband does not believe what his wife did was theft, and if she had his permission when she did it, what business is it of the state to get involved in the first place?

Our firm is equal-opportunity libertarian when it comes to the defense of our clients. Simply put, as long as it doesn’t hurt someone else—and here, the person who allegedly had been hurt specifically said it did not—then it’s none of our damn business.

Legally, we argued that it was impossible for our client to have “stolen” from her husband because the money she supposedly stole was a joint marital asset, commingled in a joint bank account, and so she has as much of a legal right to the money as her husband. Put another way, you cannot steal from yourself. And since this money belonged to our client as much as it did to her husband, it was impossible for her to have “stolen” anything.

She spent joint money from a joint account. That’s called life, not theft.

The Dismissal

As discussed above, we were strong on the law and the facts.

And so we asked the judge to dismiss the charges for a lack of probable cause. Meaning we argued that the facts, even if we accepted them as completely true, did not constitute a crime. Although we could not persuade the judge to agree with us legally (a ruling we respect but still dispute), it did give us a strong foundation for our client’s defense at trial.

The defense was a mixture of the legal and factual arguments discussed above. And we found various legal materials that supported jury instructions that we believed would make it hard for a jury to convict our client.

The  pièce de résistance was a provision stating that, while “partners” can steal from each other, they cannot if they are married.

We believe this was the breaking point, as shortly after we flagged this and filed a notice that we planned to use it at trial, the state dismissed the case.

Our client’s years-long ordeal was finally over

The Takeaway

Two things come to mind from this case: (1) the benefit of getting lawyers involved pre-charge; and (2) the detrimental effect of government overreach.

Here, while it’s impossible to know one way or another, it’s hard to believe we would have gotten the same outcome—a pretrial dismissal—had our client not hired us before she was charged. And that’s because normally we start a criminal case with the wind at our face, not our back. Meaning the state has had a long time to investigate the case before making its charging decision, and it’s all done before we have any chance to review the evidence and fight back.

Not here.

Here we got to investigate the case at the about same time as the state, thereby making the fight much more fair than normal. Given the unlimited resources of the state, it will never be a fair fight, but it felt a little more “even” than normal. For that, we’re grateful.

Next, while our client was elated to have her criminal case dismissed, it didn’t come without a cost. And we’re not just talking the money it takes to hire a law firm to defend the case.

It’s also our client’s reputation, which was greatly harmed in her small, rural Minnesota community.

It’s also the relationship between her and her husband, which may never fully recover because the state stuck its nose where it didn’t belong.

And it’s also our client’s loss of faith in her government. Before she was charged, our client worked for a Minnesota state agency. She believed in the state and its commitment to doing good for its citizens. Now, she’s less sure, understandably so.

We, too, share this view. Because we see it both ways.

Does the state often help people in need? Yes, of course.

But does it also harm people in the way it did here? Also yes.

And that’s a hard circle to square.