“The passage of time is both an enemy and an ally,” Jeff Paulsen said for neither the first nor the final time, speaking to reporters outside Courtroom 840 following the Clark verdict. “It’s true that people die and memories fade, but it’s also true that attitudes change and a case that could not have been successfully prosecuted in 1970 was successfully prosecuted now because people were willing, finally, to come forward and tell what they knew.
“The message from both verdicts, from both the convictions of Ronald Reed and Larry Clark, is that it’s never too late to do justice.”
Much later, Paulsen acknowledged that the “centerpiece” of the state’s case in both trials actually had nothing to do with memory and had proved impervious to the passing of time. He was speaking about the carefully preserved recording of Connie Trimble’s phone call, which had survived its own aging, a series of investigations and grand jury hearings, and a long-ago trial. “There was no question that was Trimble’s voice on the tape,” Paulsen said, “and once you have her making that call, and once it’s established that she was Reed’s girlfriend at the time, and once you have all those witnesses coming in and saying Ronnie and Larry hated cops and were trying to get a Black Panther charter and wanted to make a statement—then it all came together. But it was centered on that tape, that core piece of evidence, which was not dependent on anybody’s memory or motivation.” The recording was, to Paulsen’s mind, the equivalent of a smoking gun.
“Trimble made the call, and Reed was with her when she made the call, and they went to Clark’s house about three minutes before the shooting and the victim fell a hundred yards away. She can shade it all she wants at that point. She can say she doesn’t think they ever left the house. But she made the call and that’s what brought the officer to the scene and the officer was killed. Even if Reed didn’t leave the house, even if he’s not out there pulling the trigger, he’s in on the conspiracy, and he’s guilty of both aiding and abetting and conspiracy.
“Then there were the notes that were in Reed’s pocket when he was arrested [in November 1970],” Paulsen went on, with the certitude of a man who has proven his case. “To me, those notes were a second smoking gun. Our whole theory of the case was laid out in those notes, in Ronnie’s handwriting. I’m going to hijack a plane. I’m going to kill people unless I get what I want. What do I want? I want Connie Trimble, Larry Clark, and Gary Hogan released from jail. I want free airtime for the Panthers’ platform. I want $50,000 in gold. You couldn’t write a more incriminating script or one more in line with the government’s theory. He didn’t say anything about killing a cop, but if you take those notes together with Trimble’s phone call and the other testimony, it all adds up.”
Tom Dunaski, who had invested even more time in the case than the prosecutors, summed up the investigators’ feelings in his inimitable fashion. “With Larry,” he said, “I thought it could go either way. We weren’t putting the gun in his hands. Plus, you never know what a jury’s going to do. So it was pretty much I’d take the one and the other would be a bonus. With Ronnie, I’d been pretty confident. Larry was more touch-and-go. I was relieved we got both convictions.”
“It was like winning the lottery to have the case not just solved but resolved in a courtroom,” Neil Nelson said. “The chances of having another cold-case cop murder solved liked that, with no DNA or whatever—it will never happen again.”
The older, retired cops such as Ed Steenberg and Joe Corcoran seemed confident the jury would judge history the way they believed they had lived it. “I had no doubt about the verdicts,” Steenberg said. “It was the two of them and Connie. I think there were other people who were aware of the murder, but we’ll probably never know if there was anyone else directly involved.”
“It’s a shame it took thirty-six years, but it was resolved today,” Ron Ryan Sr. told the Pioneer Press outside the Reed courtroom.
Dan Bostrom said, “You never get over the loss, but [a guilty verdict] brings some closure.”
The guilty verdicts did not settle the issue for everybody. After Reed’s trial, Tyrone Terrill, the director of St. Paul’s department of human rights, told the Star Tribune, “Somebody did it, but the question is: Are you sure you’ve got the right person?” The Reverend Devin Miller, described in the Pioneer Press as a “liaison between law enforcement and [St. Paul’s] black community,” called Reed’s trial an “injustice” and asked, “Was the evidence really there, or was this trial really about something more?”
James Mann was typically contrarian following the verdicts, insisting, without elaboration, that the case was “never properly investigated.” He added, “The man is dead, and no one knows who did it. That’s the best I can say.” So Reed and Clark were not the killers? he was asked. “I think any number of people could have been involved,” Mann replied. “But there was no proof of one damn thing. No evidence.”
Ron Edwards, the most resourceful of the local skeptics, referred in his blog to the infamous Dred Scott case of 1857, quoted Roger Taney, the U.S. Supreme Court’s chief justice at the time (“There are just no rights that a Black American has that we … are obligated to respect and honor”), and declared during jury deliberation in the second trial, “Justice is indeed being denied to Larry Clark, just as it was denied to Ronald Reed.” Edwards had been arguing since the men’s arrests that the “establishment,” desperate to solve the Sackett murder, had built its case on coercion, payoffs, and bad faith. “We are not here to defend Black men because they are Black,” he wrote. “The guilty indeed belong in jail. We are here to defend Reed and Clark because we believe them to be innocent of the Sackett murder. Our concern is for unjustly jailed Blacks, of which we consider Reed and Clark to be in the Sackett case.”
A week after the conclusion of Clark’s trial, Reed spoke for himself in an interview with Shannon Prather of the Pioneer Press. “I didn’t kill anybody,” he said. “I didn’t conspire to kill anybody.” Beginning his life term at the state’s Oak Park Heights maximum-security facility thirty minutes east of St. Paul, Reed denied he had ever been the angry young militant as portrayed during the trials. That was a persona created by the state, he said. “They wanted a conviction. They wanted a scapegoat. They wanted to close the case.” He said he was the victim of law enforcement’s obsession with cold cases. He denied that he and Trimble had been together the night of Sackett’s murder but said he couldn’t remember where he was at the time. He said he did not attempt to rob the Omaha bank, either. He was arrested for that crime, he said, because he was a suspect in the Sackett case.
When he was arrested and charged with the Sackett murder, Reed told the reporter, he was a “responsible, productive member of society.” The label “cop-killer” was something he said he couldn’t comprehend. “I can’t identify with that,” he said.
Reed was already preparing his appeal. With the help of another public defender, Melissa Sheridan, he would eventually submit no fewer than thirteen reasons—“claims of error,” in legal terminology—why his district court conviction should be reversed. Reed argued, for instance, that the evidence presented at his trial was “insufficient as a matter of law to support his conviction.” He argued that under 1970 law he would have been tried, as a nineteen-year-old at the time, in juvenile court, so the district court did not have jurisdiction in his case. He argued that Judge Johnson improperly deterred him from testifying on his own behalf by threatening to introduce the attempted Omaha bank robbery. He argued that Trimble Smith had lied in her testimony on behalf of the state. He argued that Johnson erred in not telling the jury that Trimble Smith’s testimony required corroboration by other evidence.
On August 23, 2007, the Minnesota Supreme Court rejected Reed’s claims. In a twenty-four-page opinion, the court found that none “constitute[d] reversible error.”
Larry Clark also appealed his conviction. And his appeal, like Reed’s, crawled through the overloaded judicial system at a snail’s pace. In Clark’s case, however, the outcome was a surprise. In a voluminous ruling handed down on August 28, 2008, the state’s high court reversed Clark’s conviction and remanded his case to district court for a new trial. Clark’s appeal had included only five points of contention, generally similar to some of Reed’s, and the court rejected four of them. The fifth argued that Johnson erred by not telling the jury that Trimble Smith was an accomplice in the Sackett murder and thus her testimony needed to be supported by other testimony. Reed had argued the same point—but responding to his appeal, the justices, while agreeing that the judge erred, said that in Reed’s trial there had been sufficient testimony to corroborate Trimble Smith’s account. In Clark’s trial, while it was again “reasonable for a jury to consider [Trimble Smith] to be an accomplice,” Justice Paul H. Anderson wrote, the evidence against Clark was generally weaker than it had been against Reed and not strong enough to offset the judge’s omission.
Once again, Trimble Smith’s role in the now thirty-eight-year-old drama was central to the story. She could not, under the Constitution’s double-jeopardy clause, be tried again, but, the court said, she could “theoretically be charged with conspiracy to commit murder” and thus could be “reasonably considered an accomplice.”
Reacting to the court’s decision, the prosecutors said they didn’t think they could have “theoretically” charged Trimble as an accomplice. They pointed out, moreover, that defense counsel in neither the Reed nor the Clark trial asked Johnson to instruct the jury on that point. “And, frankly,” Jeff Paulsen said later, “the last thing [Clark’s lawyers] wanted the jury to be told was that Connie Trimble was a co-conspirator in the murder. They didn’t want Connie to be any part of it because Connie said she went to Larry Clark’s house that night.” Paulsen said he thought the accomplice ruling “might have signaled a larger issue the supreme court had—not so much with Clark’s conviction, but with a mandatory life sentence for a guy who was more an aider and abettor than the principal.”
Clark’s trial counsel Connie Iversen said she was ready to go back to court. “I never put the case away,” she told the Star Tribune. “It’s still sitting here in boxes.” Gurdip Singh Atwal, the assistant state public defender who helped with Clark’s appeal, told a journalist that Clark was pleased with the ruling. He had been actively involved in the appeal and “upbeat” during the drawn-out process, Atwal said. “Whenever I talked to him, he was very positive, looking on the brighter side of things, which isn’t easy to do in prison.” Then again, Clark had more than the supreme court’s decision to be happy about.
Seven justices sit on the Minnesota Supreme Court. Two of them, who were not members of the court when the case was argued in front of it almost a year earlier, did not take part in the Clark ruling. Of the five who did, four voted to reverse and remand. The fifth, Alan Page, argued that the entire case against Clark should be dismissed.
Justice Page, who three weeks earlier had turned sixty-three, was a celebrated member of the Minnesota Vikings when Patrolman Sackett was murdered. A native of Canton, Ohio, and a college All-American at the University of Notre Dame, he was in the salad days of a professional football career in 1970, one of the game’s most feared defensive linemen and an eventual inductee in its Hall of Fame. The first African American to serve on Minnesota’s high court, he had been an associate justice since 1993, following ten years of a post-football law career that included experience in both private practice and as a state assistant attorney general. Still physically formidable—at six-four and 240 pounds, he maintained a rigorous training regimen—he surprised people with his soft-spoken reticence, though there was little question where he stood on racial issues. His out-of-court interests included a large collection of slavery and racist memorabilia (slave chains, lawn jockeys, a fluorescent sign reading COLORED that once hung in an Alabama bus station) that he and his wife displayed in their Minneapolis home. The repugnant items reminded Page, according to a 2007 feature in the Star Tribune, that “not only have things not always been equal, they’re still not, and that we need to make sure we don’t go back to those ways.”
In his nineteen-page opinion, Page wrote, “My review of the record leads me to the conclusion that the corroborating evidence relied on by the court is insufficient as a matter of law and therefore may not be used to support Clark’s conviction. Because I further conclude that the remaining evidence, absent the accomplice testimony, is legally insufficient to support Clark’s conviction, I would reverse Clark’s conviction outright and not remand for a new trial.…
“The evidence the State relies on to support Clark’s aiding and abetting conviction is the same circumstantial evidence the State relies on in support of Clark’s conspiracy conviction. Again, there is no direct evidence of Clark’s involvement in Officer Sackett’s shooting. [T]he evidence of Clark’s presence at United Black Front meetings, his agreement with Reed’s statements about killing a police officer, statements of his own about black power and self-defense, and Clark’s close relationship with Reed, standing alone, does nothing more than suggest that Clark is guilty because of his association with Reed and is insufficient to support an inference that Clark played a knowing role in the shooting of Officer Sackett.
“Moreover, [Arthur] Harper’s testimony that Reed and Clark were seen leaving [Kelly] Day’s apartment establishes nothing more than Clark’s mere presence in Reed’s company some 15 or 30 minutes before the shooting. That evidence does not, however, place Clark in Reed’s company at the time of or after the shooting. Nor does it lead unerringly to the conclusion that Clark knew of the plan to shoot a police officer that night or that he played a knowing role in the plan.”
Paulsen, Hudson, and Hudson’s boss, Ramsey County Attorney Susan Gaertner, bristled at the supreme court’s decision and considered Page’s position flat-out wrong. The fact that they themselves (as well as their own investigators and many observers on both sides of the color line) believed the case against Clark had its weaknesses—was “touch-and-go,” in Dunaski’s words—did not mean they thought the verdict was reversible. In any event, it was now up to Gaertner’s office to decide what to do next.
“We are carefully reviewing this decision to determine whether to go forward,” she told the St. Paul Police Federation a few weeks after the ruling. “Be assured that we will do everything possible to see that the defendant is held accountable for his acts.”
The passage of still more time, Gaertner acknowledged, would make a retrial of Larry Clark more difficult, fraught with unknowns. Would testimony from the first trial be admissible in the second? At least one important witness, Eddie Garrett, had died of a heart attack in March 2007. The whereabouts of many of the others was uncertain, as was their willingness to face, for a second or a third time, not only hostile counsel but angry, perhaps vindictive members of the community. None of the state’s lawyers, much less her handlers in the police department, wanted to deal again with Trimble. On the positive side, the state didn’t have to hurry. Clark was in prison and would stay there while the issue was decided.
So instead of a matter of weeks, as Gaertner told a reporter shortly after the supreme court ruling, the seemingly interminable Sackett case dragged on for another six months—well into a new year. And then it came to a sudden and unanticipated conclusion.
On February 19, 2009, Ramsey County and Larry Clark reached a plea agreement that would make no one, with the likely exception of the defendant, happy. Clark entered, and Judge Johnson accepted, what is known as an Alford plea (named after a North Carolina criminal defendant at the center of a 1970 U.S. Supreme Court case), by which the defendant does not admit guilt but concedes that the state has enough evidence to convict him. Clark entered the plea to a single count: conspiracy to commit premeditated murder. The deal stipulated five years of prison time, then a year on supervised release. However, because Clark had already served more than four years since his arrest in January 2005, he would be provisionally free in eleven months.
An Alford plea serves a purpose—terminating a seemingly interminable case—but it is the kind of “back-room deal” that infuriates crime victims, police unions, and newspaper readers who write angry letters to the editor. Some states do not allow the plea, and the federal government uses it sparingly. After the Clark agreement was announced, David Titus, president of St. Paul’s police federation, called it “outrageous.” Letters to the Pioneer Press demanded the removal of both Gaertner and Johnson, who had been reelected a district court judge in November 2006. James Sackett Jr., after a long, thoughtful pause, told a journalist, “It is what it is.”
It was the first Alford plea that Jeff Paulsen had been a part of in his twenty-year prosecutorial career. (Susan Hudson, in a like amount of time, had been involved in only a few.) But this was a highly unusual situation, he explained later. “It’s very rare where you convict beyond a reasonable doubt, get a remand for some technical error, then work out an agreement with a person who wants an Alford plea,” he said.
“I don’t believe the county attorney would have gone for an Alford plea pre-trial, but post-trial, after we had already proven our case, it wasn’t as big a hurdle. We could have rounded up our remaining witnesses and tried Clark again. We still had faith in our case. But reading between the lines of the supreme court opinion, it seemed like there was the possibility that even if we won again, they might reverse. It seemed, reading between the lines, that they might not have wanted to affirm a life sentence for somebody who even according to the government’s theory wasn’t the shooter. So this was a compromise.”
If Clark had taken the deal the state had offered before the trials and agreed to testify against Reed, Paulsen said, he probably would have ended up serving about the same amount of time, which may or may not have made anyone feel better.
“He’s guilty, and he knows he’s guilty,” Jim Sackett Jr. said. “He really can’t go out and say, ‘I didn’t do it.’ If we had gone through another trial, another five weeks, the outcome would probably have been the same. He was found guilty and did time. Hopefully, when he gets out, he’ll violate probation and go back in.”
A few weeks before the two sides reached their agreement, Sackett and his mother joined Paulsen, Hudson, and the investigators for lunch at DeGidio’s, a red-sauce Italian eatery on West Seventh. The lawyers explained how an Alford plea worked and how it would affect Clark’s sentence. “We’re willing to make another try,” Paulsen told them. “But this is what could happen: We could lose everything.” Still, he made it clear that it would be up to the family to decide whether the state should accept the deal.
The Sacketts did not want Clark to go free. They believed he should serve more time than stipulated by the proposed deal. Only one more year in prison didn’t seem right—it would not come close to all the years they had suffered with their loss. On the other hand, they, too, believed Clark was an aider and abettor, not the instigator or the shooter, so making a deal with him would not be the same as making a deal with Reed, which would have been impossible to accept. Almost as difficult would be sitting through another trial. Beginning with Trimble’s trial in 1972, Jeanette Sackett had persevered through three of them. Three times she had listened to the arguments, alibis, and ghostly recorded voices, and three times she had looked at the blown-up photos of the crime scene and heard a medical examiner describe her husband’s fatal wounds. People who had never been through the experience could not imagine how stressful and exhausting it was—how much it took out of you, how it ground you down. And what if they retried Clark and the jury found him not guilty of the charges?
The prosecutors neither recommended the plea agreement nor spoke against it. They asked Jeanette what she thought. She said her gut feeling was to accept it, but she wanted to talk to the rest of the family. Which she did. And they told her to do what she believed was best. “We all signed off on it,” Jim Jr. said later.
“I just didn’t want to go through that again,” Jeanette said about the prospect of another trial. “I don’t think I could have handled it.” She said she worried about what the investigators would think, after all the time and hard work they had put into the case. But Dunaski, Mead, and Duff could sense the relief behind her decision. Whatever you feel is best for the family, they told her.
On that raw February day, after the two sides had agreed to the controversial plea, fifty-eight-year-old Larry Clark was driven back to prison. Thanks to their agreement, he now had less than a year to serve before he was—conditionally, at least—a free man.
That afternoon Jeanette, Jim Jr., and Simon Monteon sat down once more with the prosecution team before heading home and resuming their lives. Jeanette had no second thoughts about the decision. “That was the right move,” she told the lawyers. She was sixty-five years old. Jim Sackett Sr. would have been sixty-six. She knew her life and her children’s lives would have been very different if Jim had come home as usual after his shift on May 22, 1970, but there was no point dwelling on that now.
It was over.