Following the loss of our recent appeal, I wanted to know just how often the Minnesota Court of Appeals confronts situations where a trial judge conducts their own (independent) investigation into disputed facts—a practice that runs directly against the core principle that judges decide cases based on the record, not their personal fact-gathering.
Using the Minnesota Law Library’s opinion search tool, I ran a series of targeted searches. The results speak volumes. My first search for “independent investigation”—covering both precedential and non-precedential opinions—produced 132 opinions. Narrowing that to “independent investigation” AND “forfeited” (cases where the Court said the issue was lost for not being preserved) left five opinions, but not a single one involved forfeiture of the independent investigation claim itself.
Next, I tried the exact phrase the Court of Appeals used in Stevenson: “own investigation”. That yielded 56 opinions. Adding “forfeited” dropped it to three opinions—and here’s the kicker: only one of those three involved forfeiture of an “own investigation” claim—ours. That makes Stevenson v. Stevenson not just unusual, but an extreme outlier:
Search Results at a Glance
| Search Phrase | Opinions Found | Opinions Found with “Forfeited” | Forfeitures Related to the Claim |
|---|---|---|---|
| “independent investigation” | 132 | 5 | 0 |
| “own investigation” | 56 | 3 | 1 (Stevenson) |
Out of all the cases in Minnesota where either “independent investigation” or “own investigation” is mentioned, ours is the only one where the Court brushed it aside as forfeited—and it did so even though we explicitly raised the issue in our motion to recuse, backed by a sworn declaration and detailed record citations.
Let that sink in: the one time in Minnesota’s appellate history where this form of judicial overreach was dismissed on a technical forfeiture finding—it happened in our case, and it happened despite the fact we did everything required to preserve the issue. The following chart shows how rare this is:
However, in two other cases decided less than a month before ours, the Court of Appeals ruled that a judge could not perform an independent investigation and rely on those facts in his decision. Period! (See State v. Bowlby; State v. Oxendine.) I could find no indication, in either case, that the issue was specifically preserved by any method other than the filing of the appeal.
If the system can sidestep one of the rarest and most serious forms of judicial misconduct—a judge acting as their own fact-finder outside the record—by declaring it “forfeited” in the face of clear preservation, then the appellate safeguards that are supposed to protect the integrity of Minnesota’s courts are paper-thin or non-existent.
When appellate courts treat a documented and preserved claim of judicial overreach as if it were never raised, they send a dangerous message: that procedural shortcuts can shield misconduct from review. Every time this happens, it erodes the public’s faith that the courts will hold their own judges to the same standards they demand of everyone else. And once that trust is gone, restoring it is far harder than preventing its loss in the first place.
For additional background and AI-assisted analysis of independent judicial investigations, visit our Independent Investigations page.
🔗 For more on judicial ethics and court reform in Minnesota, visit https://justice-denied.org.
