With the planned closing of the Stillwater prison, the Minnesota Department of Corrections has notified inmates they need to downsize their storage bins — and for some that means picking between their legal documents and personal belongings, advocacy groups said Monday.

The DOC is also decreasing the amount of electronic storage space for legal and academic documents for people who are imprisoned throughout the state.

“There is a concerted assault on people-in-prisons’ ability to access their due process rights in court, … prove their innocence, address conditions,” said David Boehnke, co-executive director of Minnesota Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee (IWOC), which organized Monday’s news conference to sound the alarm.

The DOC said in a Monday statement that, as part of the phased four-year closing of Minnesota Correctional Facility-Stillwater, inmates are being transferred to other prisons with different physical layouts and fire code requirements.

“In particular, facilities with double-bunked housing units are subject to stricter storage limits for safety reasons,” the statement said. “The DOC has a generally applicable two bin property limit, including for legal materials, that has been repeatedly upheld when challenged in courts.”

DOC Commissioner Paul Schnell said he and his department understand the concerns raised and they “want to be clear: access to legal and educational materials is a right we are committed to upholding. The updates to our digital storage policy and property limits are driven by safety, operational capacity, and the need to modernize outdated systems.”

Inmates given options; advocates see problems

The aging and functionally obsolete Stillwater prison, which is actually located in Bayport, holds men with the lengthiest sentences and they have long been able to apply for an additional storage bin, according to IWOC.

As many as 100 men “are being told that their legal documents that they have been given approval for will be destroyed or must be shipped out when they transfer facilities, Boehnke said.

“When a person is sentenced to prison, the loss of their freedom is the punishment, not all of the other kinds of extraneous things that … eliminate their access to the court system,” said Michelle Gross, Communities United Against Police Brutality president. “They have that legal right … and the measures that the DOC is taking right now … deny people those rights.”

Stillwater prison inmates who were allowed a third storage bin for legal or academic materials “may be required to reduce to two bins to comply with fire safety standards or layout limitations,” the DOC said in its statement.

“This is not a punitive or targeted measure,” the statement continued. “The DOC is working closely with affected individuals to ensure that essential legal and academic materials are prioritized during the transfer process.”

Anyone who has “excess property” will have 30 days from the date they’re notified to make a decision, which could include shipping legal or other materials to family, friends or attorneys for long-term storage, the DOC said.

But inmates who are working on their own appeals need their documents because they “have a narrow window” and “have to have certain kinds of evidence,” Gross said.

“If this was happening when my brother Marvin Haynes was still in prison, he may still be there,” said Marvina Haynes, founder of MN Wrongfully Convicted Judicial Reform, whose brother spent 19 years in prison for murder before he was exonerated and released.

“I know how important legal documents are and how hard sometimes they are to obtain,” she added. “… Some of these folks have spent years waiting on specific documents.”

Electronic storage also at issue

Inmates keep their storage bins with them in their cells. Some go under beds or are stacked in a corner, Gross said. They are 11.25 inches by 32.25 inches by 16.25 inches, according to the DOC.

Kimberly Morgan, whose husband is incarcerated at the Stillwater prison, said he filed a petition for post-conviction relief in his case in July.

“He’s one of those at risk of losing or having to ship out his legal documentation, and if he has to do that, that’s really going to set him back a lot,” she said. He’s “having to choose between basic necessities like shoes, clothes, hygiene items or legal” documents.

If people have to get rid of their legal documents by mailing them out, it’s going to cost money and time, Morgan added.

DOC has also told inmates they’ll be reducing electronic storage of legal data from 50MB to 20MB per person and, anything not modified within one year will be automatically deleted. They’re not allowed to have personal external storage devices, such as USB or jump drives.

But evidence that includes videos and audio files can take up a lot of space, said Gross, who is a paralegal for a civil rights attorney.

“Why is the prison suddenly taking this position, especially given that … electronic storage … is dirt cheap,” she said. “… That’s actually probably easier than letting people have a bunch of paper documents. … Why are they curtailing people’s ability to have what they need to pursue their legal matters?”

The DOC is updating its digital file management practices for the first time since 2015 “in light of evolving technology and limited system-wide storage capacity,” the agency said in a statement.

The intention is “to steer storage and use of the computers to a more current model of use for legal, school, and transitional purposes, rather than a place to store documents indefinitely,” the statement continued.

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Academic materials

Inmates who are taking college courses for associate’s or bachelor’s degrees and who’ve been allowed an extra bin for their academic materials are also affected, according to IWOC.

“This isn’t just inconvenient,” Haynes said. “… Education is supposed to be a path to stability and opportunity, not a trap door that falls out from under you.”

She urged the institutions involved and elected officials “to find immediate situations.”

IWOC is calling on the Department of Corrections to allow people who had been permitted extra storage to keep it and to not reduce digital storage, but rather increase it.

Khalique Rogers first met the Center for School Change’s director and founder Joe Nathan when he was in high school.

Now, more than a decade later and after years of work together, Nathan is handing the baton to Rogers. The two have served as co-directors for the organization, with Rogers most recently taking the role as executive director this year.

The nonprofit was founded in 1987 and has focused on identifying, supporting, and implementing solutions for problems in education. It’s supported legislation to bring postsecondary enrollment options to Minnesota – allowing high schoolers to take college courses and earn college credits – as well as charter and alternative schools.

Under Rogers’ leadership, the organization is now called Catalyst for Systems Change and celebrated its official launch Monday.

Holistic approach

It’s an evolution of the work that Rogers and Nathan embarked on together around 13 years ago, when Rogers was a student at Gordon Parks High School in St. Paul, Rogers said. He was taking classes at St. Paul College through the postsecondary enrollment options program, a program that Center for School Change has helped make possible.

“From there, we connected and I started,” Rogers said. “It gave me the opportunity to advocate for more young people to utilize that program, that looked like me, people of color. And then as we continued to work, he asked me, ‘What’s something from your lived experience that you want to work on?’ And I’m like, well, youth homelessness is something I’ve experienced, it’s something I want to find solutions for because I know there’s a better way.”

From there, the two men started a coalition focused on reducing youth homelessness, with work including helping keep a homeless shelter open.

“But it shifted my lens to it because I knew that wasn’t a real solution. It’s like giving someone a fish. So what can we do to create self-sufficiency?” Rogers said.

For Rogers, that means taking a holistic approach, such as getting young people into the workforce and helping them develop skillsets, with a focus on bringing education, housing and workforce development together. The most important people in designing that work are the youth, Rogers said.

Changemakers

Nathan credits Rogers as the mind behind several of the organization’s initiatives with young people, including the organization’s Changemakers Program. Through that program, students are introduced to the legislative process and they work together to decide on the issues most important to them.

Maitreya Reeder, who will be a senior at St. Anthony Village High School in the fall, took part in the program when she and more than 65 youth attended a Changemakers event last November to share what their priorities were for the incoming legislative session. A bill requiring overdose prevention and response education in some classrooms came out on top.

“And we then moved on through sort of a six-month period of lobbying for this bill, meeting with different lawmakers and the writing of different articles to garner support for this piece of legislation as it moved through the Legislature,” Reeder said.

The bill, requiring overdose prevention education as part of health education standards, was unanimously approved by the Minnesota House of Representatives in April and passed during the special session as part of the K-12 education omnibus bill.

“And you can can learn about this stuff from an outside perspective all day in schools — you can talk about it all you want, but there’s truly nothing like being immersed in the actual legislature that will teach you the processes and give you the tools that you need to then potentially do this later in life as a career,” Reeder said.

While Catalyst for Systems Change is not a policy organization, it teaches young people how to be the next generation of leaders, Rogers said.

“So if their vision is to change a policy or it needs that, we have a whole community, so there should be people that can contribute to that,” Rogers said. “And so that’s what we do, is if I’m not the person to do it, well, there are community that have those skill sets, that we can create strategic partnerships to make a difference in the world.”

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By HANNAH SCHOENBAUM

SALT LAKE CITY (AP) — A man accused of faking his death and fleeing to the United Kingdom to avoid rape charges faced an alleged victim in court Monday as a jury trial in Utah began.

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The man known in the U.S. as Nicholas Rossi, whose legal name is Nicholas Alahverdian, is accused of sexually assaulting two women in Utah in 2008. He has pleaded not guilty to the charges. Prosecutors are trying the cases separately, with the first set in Salt Lake County.

Rossi, 38, was arrested in Scotland in 2021 — a year after he was reported dead — when he was recognized at a Glasgow hospital while receiving treatment for COVID-19. He lost an extradition appeal after claiming he was an Irish orphan named Arthur Knight who had never set foot on American soil and was being framed.

Prosecutors say they have identified at least a dozen aliases Rossi used over the years to evade capture.

Rossi appeared in court in a wheelchair, wearing a suit and tie and using an oxygen tank. The woman identified him from the witness stand, saying he’s “a little bit heavier, a little bit older” but mostly looks the same.

District Judge Barry Lawrence helped clarify for the jury some of the twists and turns of the case, explaining that different people may refer to Rossi by different names. The defense and prosecution agreed it’s factual that Rossi was in Utah in 2008 and had a relationship with the alleged victim that year.

Prosecutors painted a picture of an intelligent man who used his charm to take advantage of a vulnerable young woman. He raped her when she pushed back against his attempts to control her, said Deputy Salt Lake County District Attorney Brandon Simmons.

The woman, who the judge asked not be identified publicly, described a whirlwind relationship with Rossi that began in November 2008 while she was recovering from a traumatic brain injury. The two began dating after she responded to a personal ad Rossi posted on Craigslist and were engaged within about two weeks.

The woman described being asked to pay for their dates, cover Rossi’s rent so he wouldn’t be evicted from his apartment and take on debt to buy their engagement rings.

“I was a little bit more of a timid person back then, and so it was harder for me to stand up for myself,” she said.

The relationship spiraled quickly after their engagement, with Rossi “becoming controlling and saying mean things to me,” she testified. The couple got into a fight in which Rossi pounded on her car and used his body to block her from pulling out of the parking garage. She finally let him inside and drove him home but said she had no plans of continuing a relationship.

She agreed to go into his house to talk, but he instead pushed her onto his bed, held her down and “forced me to have sex with him,” she testified. The woman described lying still, paralyzed with fear.

Dismissive comments from her parents convinced her not to go to the police at the time, she said. She did, however, try to bring Rossi to small claims court over the engagement rings but dropped the case.

Rossi’s lawyers sought to convince the jury that the alleged victim built up years of resentment after Rossi made her foot the bill for everything in their monthlong relationship, and accused him of rape to get back at him a decade later when she saw him in the news.

Rossi will also stand trial in September over another rape charge in Utah County.

Rossi grew up in foster homes in Rhode Island and had returned to the state before allegedly faking his death. An obituary published online claimed he died on Feb. 29, 2020, of late-stage non-Hodgkin lymphoma. State police, along with Rossi’s former lawyer and a former foster family, cast doubt on whether he was dead. A year later, hospital staff in Scotland recognized his tattoos from an Interpol notice and alerted authorities. He was extradited to Utah in January 2024.

“This case is like an old puzzle from the thrift store,” said MacKenzie Potter, one of Rossi’s attorneys. “It’s 13 years old, not all the pieces are there, some pieces are from a different puzzle. And when you start going through everything, you’re not going to get a complete picture.”

Prosecutors pushed back, saying that if any “puzzle pieces” are missing, it’s because Rossi’s attorneys fought to have some evidence dismissed.

Union employees at Stillwater Medical Group voted Monday to ratify an agreement with HealthPartners, just a week after voting to authorize another unfair labor practices strike.

Ninety-five percent of the members of SEIU Healthcare MN & IA, which consists of more than 80 workers including licensed practical nurses, certified medical assistants and other service-unit health care positions in the family medicine, OB/GYN, pediatrics and specialties departments at the clinic, voted to ratify the agreement. SEIC officials said the new agreement includes 10.5% raises over the three-year life of the contract, the largest across-the-board wage increase the group has ever won; increases in longevity bonuses; increased differentials when members pick up open shifts; and new nondiscrimination language.

In July, the workers went on strike for four days.

“We are proud of today’s vote that ratifies our new contract,” said Ellie Conway, a certified medical assistant and member of the SEIU bargaining team at Stillwater Medical Group. “Because we stuck together and showed our collective power, we were able to win real gains that will benefit both ourselves and our patients. As we look forward, we know that we still have more work to do and will begin right away to build towards our next contract fight to be ready to win even more.”

A spokesman for HealthPartners said last week that the company was “pleased to have reached a fair and financially responsible resolution. We value our SEIU-represented colleagues and their commitment to our patients.”

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