Supreme Court of Minnesota· 2/12/2014

State v. Nelson

Citations

842 N.W.2d 433
2014 WL 551642
2014 Minn. LEXIS 59

How courts have described this case

Verbatim parenthetical descriptions written by other courts when citing this decision. Ranked by citation-network relevance.

concluding that when a criminal statute was ambiguous and none of the alternative reasonable interpretations was most persuasive, under the rule of lenity, the statute would be construed in favor of the defendant
stating that the rule of lenity only applies when there is “a grievous ambiguity or uncertainty in the statute”
noting that when a proposition is phrased in the negative, the use of the word “or” may give rise to an interpretation that the “or” is conjunctive
explaining that a statute's use of a conjunctive requires that all subparts be satisfied
applying the rule of lenity as a last resort, only after exhausting the other canons of construction
discussing the rule of lenity and holding that it applies only when a grievous ambiguity exists after exhausting the other canons of construction

Source: CourtListener parenthetical corpus (CC0).

Judges: Dietzen, Gildea, Lillehaug, Stras

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Cited by

44 cases in this archive cite this case; the 20 most cited are listed.

Cites

49 cases in this archive are cited by this case; the 20 most cited are listed.

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