The Minnesota Court of Appeals is asking a lower court to consider once again whether to release police video from the arrest of state Sen. Nicole Mitchell for suspected first-degree burglary last April.

Conservative news website Alpha News filed a court action last year seeking the release of body and dash camera footage captured by police as they found Mitchell in her estranged stepmother’s Detroit Lakes home last April.

The group argued that Mitchell and her attorneys made public statements that contradicted the police account of her arrest and that there was a “strong public interest and benefit in knowing about the truth related to criminal charges against a sitting State Senator.”

Becker County Judge Gretchen Thilmony ruled that Mitchell’s rights as a person accused of a crime outweighed public interest in her case and did not release arrest videos.

But in a Monday ruling, a panel of three appeals court judges said the lower court needed to consider the broader public benefit that could come from releasing a video tied to a case involving an elected official.

District court must reevaluate request

The ruling written by Appeals Court Judge Elizabeth Bentley did not take any position on whether it would be in the public interest to release the video, but now the district court must reevaluate Alpha News’ request.

Mitchell, a DFL senator from Woodbury, is scheduled to go to trial for a first-degree burglary charge after the 2025 regular legislative session ends in May. The trial was originally scheduled for January, but under state law, legislators can delay their trials until the conclusion of business at the state Capitol.

The arrest came after police responded to a break-in call in the early morning hours of April 22, 2024, and found the senator in her stepmother’s home. Mitchell said she was trying to retrieve her father’s ashes and other sentimental items and that her stepmother suffers from dementia.

“Clearly I’m not good at this,” Mitchell allegedly told officers, later adding she knew “she did something bad.”

Sen. Nicole Mitchell (Courtesy of the Becker County Sheriff’s Office)

In ethics complaints, Senate Republicans have questioned contradictions between Mitchell’s account of events and those outlined in the charges. Alpha News argued the contradictions warranted the release of the body camera videos.

After her release from jail, Mitchell made a post on social media where she said she entered the house to check on her stepmother, who had recently been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease.

The stepmother had obtained a restraining order against Mitchell and told multiple media outlets that she fears her stepdaughter. Mitchell claimed her stepmother suffers from “paranoia” because of her condition.

“The release of the body camera footage is essential to provide clarity about the events of April 22, 2024,” Republican Senate Minority Leader Mark Johnson said in a statement. “The public deserves transparency and accountability, and I hope the court will stand with them in that pursuit. Legislators must be held to a higher standard, not shielded from consequences because of the office they hold.”

Mitchell now faces two felony charges in connection with the break-in, where prosecutors allege the senator used a crowbar to pry open a basement window. Prosecutors filed a burglary tools charge in February, nearly 10 months after Mitchell’s arrest on a first-degree burglary charge.

Mitchell’s attorney: Release could jeopardize due process

In a statement on the appeals court decision, Mitchell’s defense attorney. Bruce Ringstrom Jr. said releasing body camera footage could create a jury selection problem with the trial set to begin in just two months.

“The judge presiding over the criminal case has already ordered that video coverage of the trial is allowed,” he said in an email. “Release of the evidence before the criminal trial jeopardizes due process.”

Mitchell, a first-term senator and former broadcast meteorologist who is a lieutenant colonel in the Air National Guard, was elected in 2022 and is in the third year of her four-year term. She is scheduled to face election again until 2026.

Despite calls from fellow DFLers to resign, Mitchell has said she won’t leave office. Repeated efforts by minority Senate Republicans to remove her from office have failed as they would require significant levels of support from Democrats.

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St. Paul Mayor Melvin Carter has officially appointed Matt Privratsky to fill a vacant seat on the city council, restoring a voting Ward 4 member to the post the council tried and failed to fill on its own.

The Ward 4 seat had been held by former Council President Mitra Jalali, who stepped down on Feb. 5 and officially left city employ on March 8. Privratsky, a lobbyist for clean energy developers, served as her legislative aide from October 2018 to October 2021.

“Matt’s history of community action, prior service in City Hall, and alignment with former Council President Jalali make him the perfect choice,” said Carter, in a written statement. “I am honored to appoint him to fill this vacancy until Election Day.”

Privratsky is expected to be sworn in on Wednesday, in time for public hearings on a major amendment to the city’s rent control ordinance and a raft of tenant protections, issues that had left the six other members of the council divided over whom to appoint to fill the Ward 4 seat.

After interviewing four finalists, members of the city council attempted, multiple times across two weeks, to recommend Privratsky or Hamline-Midway neighborhood advocate Lisa Clare Nelson as the council’s preferred choice, but the motions were repeatedly blocked or voided by fellow council members.

Under the city charter, the council has 30 days to fill the vacancy or the decision falls to the mayor, who has urged the council to repeal rent control for buildings constructed after 2004, with the goal of jumpstarting lagging housing construction.

The two other finalists were artist and community organizer Sean Lim and nonprofit consultant Melissa Martinez-Sones, who withdrew her name from the running amid the council’s public and highly-charged infighting.

Privratsky is a former director of public affairs for Fresh Energy and launched his career at the Minnesota Rural Electric Association after serving as news director for a Morris radio station. He is currently the director of government affairs for Nokomis Energy, a Minneapolis-based energy developer.

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Minnesota is 14-3 since March 1 and currently owns the longest winning streak in the NBA with five-straight victories.

That suggests the Timberwolves are playing some of the league’s best basketball. And yet Wolves coach Chris Finch was lamenting his team’s performance after Saturday’s narrow escape over a depleted Philadelphia squad.

Yes, the Wolves won, but they weren’t at their best in doing. And, frankly, they haven’t had to be at their best over the last month-plus.

Since Minnesota got healthy, the schedule has been wildly easy. That 17-game run includes just five games against teams with records above-.500. In those five games, they’ve beaten the Nuggets twice — with Denver missing Aaron Gordon in one game, and Jamal Murray and Michael Porter Jr. in the other — and the Pistons, who were without Cade Cunningham and Tobias Harris to open the affair, and numerous others after an ejection-inducing scuffle.

They’ve lost to a skeleton Pacers squad at home, and were blitzed by full-strength Indiana on the road.

Sandwiched in between those games are a bunch of wins against non-playoff competition, which has helped Minnesota surge up the Western Conference standings. But what has the recent stretch said about the Wolves and their potential for a deep playoff run?

Perhaps little?

On the negative side, there are still the mind-numbing mistakes when a game nears its conclusion, and the defense isn’t consistently the dominant version upon which this team’s success rests.

Positively, the offense looks great for longer periods of play, Rudy Gobert has returned to all-star, game-wrecking form and Anthony Edwards appears to have reacquired the rhythm of his lethal outside jumper.

But even the positives need to be taken with a grain of salt given the lackluster level of competition. The already low standard of play for NBA cellar dwellers only wanes as the campaign nears its conclusion and organizations do anything within their power to ensure they don’t pick up an accidental win that could prove to be the difference between selecting fifth and first in the draft.

Like Minnesota, other contenders in the West are playing well of late. But many of them are notching impressive victories that provide evidence as to how they’ll stack up in two weeks time when the playoffs begin.

Golden State convincingly beat the Lakers on Thursday. The Lakers blew out the conference-leading Thunder on Sunday. Houston has beaten Oklahoma City and the Warriors in succession.

Minnesota hasn’t had a chance to prove its mettle at full strength in months. Donte DiVincenzo, Julius Randle and Rudy Gobert all missed strings of games in January and February. Since they’ve returned, legitimate challenges have been few and far between.

Have the Wolves truly grown and evolved as a group to the point where they can topple a fellow top-six team in the West in a best-of-7 series? That’s anyone’s guess.

Some evidence to the good or bad will finally appear this week in the form of road games in Milwaukee and Memphis, teams that should be equally as motivated as Minnesota to improve their respective playoff positionings.

How the Wolves fare this week could finally provide some insight into what’s to come in the weeks to follow.

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A man is suspected of being under the influence of alcohol and speeding on Interstate 94 in Hudson before he went onto the shoulder and then crashed into David Burley, co-founder of Blue Plate Restaurant Company, according to a criminal charge filed Monday.

Burley, who was riding a motorcycle and wearing a full-face helmet, died at the hospital in St. Paul on Sunday. He was 58.

David Burley died when his motorcycle was struck by a car near Hudson on Sunday afternoon. (Courtesy of Fluence Media)

The St. Croix County District Attorney’s Office charged Andre Lamont Mathews, 33, of Brooklyn Park, with homicide by intoxicated use of a vehicle.

“Preliminary investigation indicates the car was in the right lane and attempted to overtake traffic by using the right shoulder when it struck a guardrail causing it to veer back into the right lane where it collided with a motorcycle,” the Wisconsin State Patrol said in a statement Sunday. Both Mathews’ car and Burley’s motorcycle “traveled across the roadway” and struck the median concrete barrier, the statement continued.

A Hudson police officer told a Wisconsin trooper he could “smell an odor of an intoxicant emitting from” Mathews, and a trooper at Regions Hospital reported the same thing, according to the criminal complaint. Lakeview Emergency Medical Services took Mathews to Regions Hospital.

Burley had also been brought to Regions, where he died. A trooper saw that his helmet had damage to the front and right rear.

“This breaks my heart so much,” Brian Ingram, Twin Cities chef and restaurant owner posted on social media Monday. “Such a good man taken by someone making bad decisions.”

‘Weaving in and out of traffic’

Two people reported seeing Mathews’ vehicle, a 2011 Infiniti G25, “operating at a high rate of speed and weaving in and out of traffic for several miles prior to the crash,” the complaint said.

The crash happened at 2:48 p.m. Sunday on westbound I-94 at milepost 1, according to the Wisconsin State Patrol.

A trooper met with Mathews in a trauma room at the hospital. He “appeared to be disoriented and lethargic,” was not answering questions “appropriately and stated he did not know where he was or if he was driving,” the complaint said.

Andre Lamont Mathews in an August 2018 booking photo. (Courtesy of the Hennepin County Sheriff’s Office)

Mathews would not submit to an evidentiary test of his blood, and law enforcement applied for and received a search warrant to draw his blood for testing. It could take four to six weeks for a toxicology report to come back, according to the State Patrol.

The St. Croix County District Attorney’s Office is seeking a longer sentence for Mathews, if he’s convicted, due to a past offense. He was sentenced for possession of cocaine in Hennepin County in 2018.

Mathews remained hospitalized as of Monday afternoon; he was listed in fair condition. An arrest warrant was issued for Mathews along with the complaint. An attorney for him wasn’t listed in the court file.

When a Minneapolis officer pulled over Mathews in November 2017, he saw what appeared to be a bottle of Brandy or a similar liquor bottle on the front passenger seat floorboard.

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Police found a handgun under a rear seat of Mathews’ vehicle, which had been reported stolen, according to the criminal complaint in that case. He was prohibited from possessing firearms because he had an armed robbery conviction from July 2009 in Kankakee County, Illinois.

An officer bringing Mathews to jail in 2017 heard him grinding his shoes against the floor of the squad, and found Mathews had a white powdery substance all over his hands and clothes; it was also on the floor of the squad and seat where Mathews was sitting. There were several pieces of suspected crack cocaine, which later tested positive for cocaine, the complaint said.