State of Minnesota v. Atravius Joseph Weeks

Summary

The court held that the district court abused its discretion by summarily denying Weeks’s postconviction petition because the alleged facts, viewed favorably to him, raised genuine factual questions about whether Black jurors were systematically underrepresented and whether that underrepresentation had alternative explanations. The court remanded for an evidentiary hearing on the fair-cross-section claim. It also held that the district court improperly entered convictions for lesser-included murder offenses in addition to the first-degree premeditated murder conviction and directed that those convictions be vacated.