Imagine standing in a courtroom and hearing a judge say the prosecution’s evidence against you is so thin that no reasonable jury could convict. The charge is gone. Erased. Over.
Now imagine walking out of that same courthouse and being told you must register as a predatory offender — because of that very charge.
That is not a hypothetical. That is what happened to Chad Lauren Siegel in Minnesota, and it took him more than a decade to undo it. On August 19, 2026, the Minnesota Supreme Court decided Siegel v. Evans, holding that forcing a person onto the predatory offender registry based on a charge resolved by a judgment of acquittal violates the substantive due process protections of the Minnesota Constitution.
It is a genuine win, and a rare one. But the road to it reveals something deeply uncomfortable about how registration laws are written, interpreted, and defended. This article walks through the case, explains the legal concepts in plain language, and examines why the state’s own argument may have been the thing that doomed it.
The Term You Need to Understand First: Judgment of Acquittal
Before the case makes sense, one piece of vocabulary has to be clear.
A judgment of acquittal — called a directed verdict of acquittal in some jurisdictions — is the result of a motion the defense makes after the prosecution has finished presenting its case. When the state rests, defense counsel stands and says, in effect: Your Honor, the evidence presented is so skimpy and lacking that no reasonable jury could convict this person.
Two things make this significant:
- It is a judicial finding, not a jury verdict. A judge looks at the state’s best case and concludes it does not clear the bar.
- It almost never happens. These motions are made routinely and granted rarely. When one is granted, it is a strong signal that the prosecution’s case had real problems.
In Siegel’s trial, the court granted that motion on the kidnapping counts.
What Actually Happened to Chad Siegel
The underlying facts are not sympathetic, and that matters — because constitutional protections are tested precisely on unsympathetic facts.
Siegel was charged with two counts of kidnapping (an enumerated predatory offense under Minnesota’s registration statute), attempted second-degree murder, and first-degree assault. The charges stemmed from an incident in which Siegel and accomplices beat a victim identified in court records as J.A.L.
At trial, three things happened:
- The trial court entered a judgment of acquittal on the kidnapping charges.
- The jury found him not guilty of attempted second-degree murder.
- The jury found him guilty of first-degree assault.
Here is the critical detail: first-degree assault is not an enumerated predatory offense under Minnesota’s registration statute. The only predatory charge in the case was kidnapping — and a judge had thrown it out.
Yet the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension (the BCA) still required Siegel to register as a predatory offender.
How Is That Even Possible? Read the Statute
The answer lies in the text of Minnesota Statute 243.166, subdivision 1b(a)(1). It provides that a person who has been charged with one of the statute’s enumerated predatory offenses, and who is convicted of that offense or another offense arising out of the same set of circumstances, must register as a predatory offender.
Read that again. The trigger is being charged — not convicted.
So the BCA’s math was simple: kidnapping charge (predatory, enumerated) + assault conviction (same set of circumstances) = registration. The acquittal, in the state’s view, was irrelevant.
The Minnesota Supreme Court itself acknowledged the outlier status of this scheme, noting that Minnesota is unique or nearly unique among the fifty states in imposing predatory offender registration on people charged with but never convicted of an enumerated predatory offense.
That is not a small observation. When one state out of fifty does something, courts notice.
The Long Procedural Road
Siegel’s path to relief was anything but direct.
2015 — First appeal. Siegel appealed his conviction and sentence, but did not separately challenge the registration requirement. The Court of Appeals affirmed the trial court on everything.
August 2022 — The civil suit. Siegel sued Drew Evans in his official capacity as superintendent of the BCA. His claims included:
- Violation of procedural and substantive due process
- Misapplication of the registration statute itself
- That the statute operates as an unconstitutional bill of attainder
He brought the suit under both the United States and Minnesota constitutions and under 42 U.S.C. § 1983.
District court. Both sides filed cross motions for summary judgment. The district court granted the BCA’s motion, holding that Siegel’s claims were barred by the statute of limitations. But — and this became important — the court also observed that the judgment of acquittal necessarily functioned as a collateral determination that the kidnapping charge was unsupported. It went further, stating that if the limitations period had not barred the claim, it would have concluded the acquittal legally barred the BCA from requiring registration.
Court of Appeals. The appellate court affirmed, but skipped the limitations question entirely and ruled instead that the acquittal did not bar the registration requirement. A different route to the same destination.
Minnesota Supreme Court. Review was granted on the core question: was Siegel required to register under section 243.166? The court also remanded the limitations issue back to the Court of Appeals, which had never addressed it.
The State’s Theory: The ‘Charging Period’
This is where the case moves from technical to genuinely startling.
Siegel’s argument was intuitive: once the trial court entered judgment of acquittal on the kidnapping counts, he was no longer charged with a predatory offense for purposes of the statute.
The BCA disagreed, and its counter-argument deserves to be quoted in full because it is hard to believe otherwise. The BCA argued that a person is charged with a predatory offense during a period it labeled the “time of charging” — a window that includes pretrial proceedings but ends when the trial begins.
Follow the consequences:
- If you win a pretrial motion to dismiss for lack of probable cause, you are not subject to registration. The charging period was still running, and the charge went away inside it.
- If you win a judgment of acquittal after trial starts, the charging period has already closed. You were “charged” during that window, the window shut, and now you must register if you were convicted of any other crime from the same circumstances.
So two people with functionally identical outcomes — a judge finding the predatory charge unsupportable — face opposite lifetime consequences based solely on whether the judge reached that conclusion on a Tuesday before opening statements or a Thursday after them.
On the podcast, the reaction split. Larry found a kind of dark admiration in it: someone had to sit down and invent a charging period with a defined endpoint, and he confessed he couldn’t have thought of it himself. Andy was less charitable, calling it funny only to a deranged person. Both reactions are understandable, because the theory is simultaneously creative and indefensible.
The Court’s Analysis: Three Prongs, One Failure
The Minnesota Supreme Court’s holding was notably broad. It said that even if it accepted the BCA’s interpretation of the statute, requiring registration after a judgment of acquittal on the predicate predatory offense violates the Minnesota Constitution’s substantive due process protections.
The court described its framework as reconciling two ideas: the fundamental constitutional commitment that people should generally be allowed to go about their business without government interference, and the recognized understanding that government must sometimes intervene to protect others and the common good.
That reconciliation happens through a three-part inquiry:
- Is the objective of the law permissible? Does it serve a public purpose within the legislature’s power? — The state passed this.
- Could the legislature rationally believe the chosen mechanism would help achieve the goal or mitigate the harm? Notably, the mechanism need not be the best or most precise one available; it only has to be reasonable. — The state passed this too.
- Did the legislature act arbitrarily or capriciously? — This is where it fell apart.
Two out of three is not a passing grade in constitutional law.
Why Plea Bargains Are Different from Acquittals
The court’s reasoning leaned on a twenty-five-year-old precedent, Boutine v. LeFleur, and the distinction it drew is the analytical heart of the opinion.
Boutine recognized legitimate public purposes behind registration: assisting law enforcement in investigating predatory offenses, tracking the whereabouts of people considered likely to reoffend, and — critically — preventing people from avoiding registration through plea agreements. Under Boutine, requiring registration from someone who was charged with a predatory offense but pleaded guilty to a different charge in exchange for dismissal of the predatory count is a reasonable means of achieving those purposes.
The logic holds. In a plea bargain, nobody tested the predatory allegation. The defendant negotiated around it. The state gave something up. The underlying conduct was never adjudicated.
An acquittal is the opposite. A judge looked directly at the state’s evidence and said there was not enough there for any reasonable jury. There is no bargain, no evasion, no untested allegation. There is a judicial determination on the merits.
The court concluded that extending registration to people acquitted at trial “would be more the result of chance, whim, or impulse than the result of a reasoned deliberative legislative process, and as such is arbitrary and capricious.”
It also noted something the state could not overcome: nothing suggested the legislature had ever considered whether registering acquitted persons would serve the law’s purposes, and the BCA offered no evidence that it would. Having chosen to resolve the case on summary judgment, the state had built no record to draw from — a strategic decision that arguably cost it the case.
The Dissent, and a Blunt Rebuttal
One justice dissented, but not in the way you might expect. The dissent concurred with the constitutional analysis and conclusion while objecting to the court reaching the merits at all. In the dissenter’s view, the statute of limitations question was properly before the court, the district court had analyzed it, and the case should have ended there.
Larry’s response was characteristically unvarnished — he suggested the dissenting judge was “smoking wacky weed” and needed to go back to school. Beneath the color, though, is a serious argument about legal hierarchy:
A statute of limitations is just that — a statute. The Constitution is not subject to change except through an arduous process.
He pointed to Class v. United States (2018), in which the U.S. Supreme Court held that a criminal defendant who pleads guilty does not automatically waive the right to challenge the constitutionality of the statute of conviction on direct appeal. A guilty plea admits that the defendant performed the factual actions charged; it does not admit that the government had constitutional authority to prosecute those actions. Class was built on earlier precedents including Blackledge v. Perry (1974) and Menna v. New York (1975).
The extension is straightforward: if the government lacked constitutional power to impose the registration requirement, a procedural deadline should not be what preserves it. As Larry framed the absurdity — imagine passing an unconstitutional law and then insisting a conviction under it stands because someone missed a filing window.
Where Siegel Stands Now
The outcome is partial but meaningful.
- He won the constitutional issue. The BCA cannot require him to register based on the dismissed kidnapping charge.
- His assault conviction remains. He still carries convictions from this case.
- The predatory offender designation is gone — which, as the hosts noted, is the piece that causes the real, daily consternation.
- The limitations issue returns to the Court of Appeals on remand, though the constitutional holding makes its practical significance questionable.
The segment closed on a reflective note about clients who spend enormous sums late in life pursuing expungements to clear a family name. It is a reminder that registry consequences are not abstract. They follow people into their eighties. They outlast sentences, employment, and sometimes the people themselves.
Three Takeaways
1. Registration triggered by allegations rather than convictions is constitutionally fragile. Minnesota’s statute survived two prongs of the due process test and still lost. Any state law that attaches lifetime consequences to unproven charges should expect scrutiny — and advocates should look for it.
2. Procedural deadlines should not shield unconstitutional statutes. Whether or not the Siegel majority explicitly adopted this reasoning, the Class line of cases supports challenging a law’s constitutional validity regardless of elapsed time. If you are told your challenge is too late, that advice deserves a second look.
3. How the government litigates matters as much as what it argues. The BCA moved for summary judgment and then had no evidentiary record when the court asked whether registering acquitted people actually serves the statute’s purposes. The absence of that record was not a technicality — it was decisive.
The Bottom Line
Siegel v. Evans did not dismantle Minnesota’s registry. It did not declare section 243.166 unconstitutional across the board. It held the statute unconstitutional as applied to one man in one circumstance.
But the circumstance is not rare in principle, and the reasoning travels. When a judge determines that the state’s evidence on a predatory charge could not support a conviction, that determination has to mean something. After Siegel, in Minnesota, it does.