Star Tribune
Marvin Haynes, sentenced to life in 2004 flower shop killing, seeks to overturn conviction
Marvin Haynes always maintained his innocence, denying any role in the deadly 2004 flower shop robbery that sent him away for life when he was a teenager.
But after nearly two decades behind bars, he has another chance at freedom.
Attorneys from the Great North Innocence Project argued in Hennepin County District Court Monday that Haynes was wrongfully convicted based on faulty eyewitness identification and improper police lineups — conducted in a way that unsettled even the lead detective.
No physical evidence ever linked Haynes to the fatal shooting of 55-year-old shop clerk Randy Sherer in north Minneapolis. Haynes, then 16, did not match the physical description eyewitnesses provided to investigators. And several witnesses who testified at his trial have since signed affidavits recanting their statements.
“Based on all this evidence, we are confident that following this evidentiary hearing, the court will have ample basis to conclude that Mr. Haynes conviction is legally and factually defective and should therefore be vacated,” Innocence Project attorney Andrew Markquart said during brief opening remarks before Judge William Koch.
The road to an exoneration in this case is an uphill climb for the defense, which is meeting resistance from current and former members of the Hennepin County Attorney’s Office. Former prosecutor Mike Furnstahl told the Star Tribune in March that he stands by the conviction and is “110% confident” in Haynes’ guilt. He cited key testimony by several teenagers, including Haynes’ own cousin, who reported Haynes making incriminating statements before and after the murder.
On Monday, Assistant Hennepin County Attorney Anna Light reminded the court that a jury found Haynes guilty of first-degree murder in 2005 after a thorough reading of the evidence.
“That determination of guilt cannot be set aside lightly,” she said.
Scant evidence
On May 16, 2004, siblings Randy Sherer and Cynthia McDermid were working at Jerry’s Flower Shop at North 33rd and Lyndale Avenues when a young man walked in saying he wanted flowers for his mother. McDermid began to prepare a bouquet.
She soon stared up into the barrel of a silver revolver. The man barked orders demanding money and the security tapes. Sherer emerged from the back, saying there was no money to take. When the robber aimed the gun at her brother, McDermid fled. Two gunshots rung out.
McDermid — the sole eye witness to the crime — described the shooter to police as a 19 to 22 year old Black male, thin build, medium or dark-skinned, nearly six feet tall, 180 pounds, with “close-cropped” hair. There was no forensic evidence from the scene, no video surveillance or viable fingerprints. The weapon was never found.
Police showed McDermid an initial photo lineup that didn’t include Haynes. With 75% to 80% certainty, she chose a man who matched her description but had an alibi.
Two days after the murder, then-Minneapolis police Sgt. Michael Keefe got an anonymous tip that the shooter was “Little Marvin.”
Police soon arrested Marvin Haynes, then 16, for missing a court appearance for violating curfew. His booking photo shows him with a long afro and thin mustache. He was 5 feet 7 inches tall and 130 pounds.
Investigators presented McDermid with another photo lineup. But instead of using Haynes’ mugshot with the longer hair taken hours earlier, they substituted a two-year-old photo of him with short, close-cropped hair. She ultimately pinned him as the shooter.
Detectives then arranged an in-person lineup, where five young men — different from those in the photo lineup — acted as fillers. Haynes was the only person in both.
Both McDermid and a local middle schooler, who claimed to have seen a slender Black male flee from the flower shop following a gunshot that day, each chose Haynes, with varying degrees of confidence.
But the way MPD conducted the suspect lineups violated longstanding best practices by repeatedly exposing witnesses to the same person and using an out-of-date mugshot of Haynes, said Nancy Steblay, a retired professor emeritus of psychology at Augsburg University.
“These are very poor lineups,” Steblay testified Monday. “And the elements are such that this suggests high-risk for identification error, extremely high risk.”
The fact that McDermid initially picked a innocent person — whose physical appearance greatly differed from that of Haynes — also cast doubt on her reliability as a witness, said Steblay, who was commissioned to review Haynes’ case for the Innocence Project.
Memory is malleable, she wrote in her report, with mistaken eyewitness identification faulted for nearly 80% of wrongful convictions in the first 200 cases overturned by DNA evidence.
Keefe, one of the original detectives on the case, also testified Monday that presenting Haynes to the eyewitnesses multiple times was “reckless and irresponsible.”
He recalled that, when a supervisor ordered him to conduct a second lineup with Haynes as the main suspect, he thought it was a joke and questioned the legality. Despite a contentious debate with command staff, Keefe was overruled; Senior Hennepin County attorneys approved the maneuver.
In his experience, eyewitnesses who are confident about their suspect identification often slam their fingers down on the perpetrators’ image and say ‘this is the guy!” Keefe testified. “Cynthia just couldn’t do that.”
McDermid died in 2020.
Looking back, the detective said a “slow and methodical” investigation would have been more proper than using the “hurry up” secondary lineup tactic. But he soon fell ill with cancer and was unable to testify at the original trial.
Doubts about Haynes’ guilt lingered for years, even after his retirement. Under questioning from the defense, Keefe acknowledged that Haynes’ case is the only one, among hundreds he’d worked to secure convictions on, that left him feeling unsettled.
Late last year, the Innocence Project submitted the Haynes case to the Minnesota Attorney General Office’s Conviction Review Unit. Judge Koch agreed to grant the defense an a multi-day evidentiary hearing this week.
Testimony continues Tuesday morning, where Haynes is expected to take the stand.
Staff writer Susan Du contributed to this report.
“DHS and our state and federal partners have seen evidence that kickbacks are happening in Minnesota,” Inspector General Kulani Moti said in a statement. “That’s why we brought an anti-kickback proposal to the Minnesota Legislature last session. We will continue to work with the Legislature next session on ways to strengthen the integrity of our public programs.”
Nuway Alliance, one of the state’s largest nonprofit substance use disorder treatment providers, pays up to $700 a month for someone’s housing while they are in intensive outpatient treatment, the organization’s website states. The site lists dozens of sober housing programs clients can choose from.
Nuway leaders said they got an inquiry from the government about two and a half years ago indicating they are conducting a civil investigation into the housing model.
But officials with the nonprofit said in an email they believe what they are doing is legal and clients need it. More than 600 people are using their assistance to stay in recovery residences, Nuway officials stated. They said having a safe, supportive place to stay is particularly important for the vulnerable people they serve, more than half of whom reported being homeless in the six months before they started treatment.
Health plans knew about, approved and even lauded their program, Nuway leaders said, noting that health insurer UCare even gave it an award.
“The state of Minnesota has been fully aware of our program for a decade,” the organization said. “Since payors are fully aware of, and support the program, we struggle to see how anyone could argue it is improper, let alone fraudulent.”
Mounds View, the first Minnesota city to require homeowners to discharge racist language buried in deeds before they sell their homes, is celebrating a milestone: at least 100 homeowners have completed the process.
Officials say discharging the language is a symbolic step, but an important one.
“How could we call ourselves an inclusive community with the words ‘This home shall not be sold to a non-white person’ buried in the deeds?” Mayor Zach Lindstrom said at the state of the city address Monday.
Racially restrictive covenants, found in deeds around the Twin Cities and Minnesota, were legally enforceable tools of racial segregation for the first half of the 20th century. They barred homes’ sale to, and sometimes even occupancy by, anyone who wasn’t white until 1948, when they became unenforceable. Mapping Prejudice, a University of Minnesota research project uncovering these covenants, has found more than 33,000 of them in Minnesota, including more than 500 in Mounds View.
Many local cities have partnered with Just Deeds, a coalition that helps cities and their residents learn about and discharge covenants. In 2019, the Legislature passed a law allowing homeowners to add language to their deeds that discharges racist covenants but doesn’t erase them from the record. Earlier this year, Mounds View was the first to pass an ordinance requiring it. The city is also helping residents navigate the process.
Just because these covenants are no longer enforceable doesn’t mean they haven’t had long-lasting consequences, Kirsten Delegard, Mapping Prejudice project director, said at a Mounds View City Council meeting this summer: Minneapolis homes with racial covenants are worth 15% more than those without, she said. And neighborhoods with covenants remain the whitest parts of the Twin Cities.
Mounds View residents Rene and Steven Johnson were troubled to learn from Mapping Prejudice that their house, and many homes in their neighborhood, had racially restrictive covenants on them. It took some effort, including a trip to the Ramsey County Recorder’s Office, to find the document, which not only contained race restrictions but barred unmarried couples from owning the home.
The couple got their covenant discharged, and educated the city about the process, Rene Johnson said. That helped lead to the ordinance requiring covenants to be discharged before sale.
ZUMBRO RIVER VALLEY, MINN. – From his combine on an October afternoon, harvesting dried-out soybeans the color of dust, Martin Larsen points to a hillside where his ancestors from Scandinavia homesteaded.
History might be happening again on the Larsen farm.
Last year, on this plot of land along the Zumbro River, the 43-year-old farmer from Byron grew oats. Not oats for hogs or cows. But oats for humans. He hauled the oats to a miller across the state line into Iowa. A previous year, Larsen even had a contract with Oatly, the trendy Swedish maker of milk alternatives.
Something of an oat renaissance has been occurring down in the fields west of the Mississippi River. During winters, Larsen — through his job with the Olmsted County Soil and Water Conservation District — evangelized to fellow farmers on the humble small grain.
His friends and neighbors were listening. As of this fall, over 60 farmers, covering 6,000 acres across southern Minnesota, have joined Larsen’s informal coalition to grow food-grade oats. They call themselves the “oat mafia.”
Star of breakfast food, children’s books and, increasingly, those nondairy lattes, oats are easier on the environment, requiring less nitrogen than corn, which means a lot in the karst-rich hill country of southeastern Minnesota, where the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has tasked state officials with cleaning up drinking water.
“Nitrates come from this,” said Larsen, driving his gray Gleaner combine on a patch of soybeans beneath a hillock just beyond the suburban sprawl of northwest Rochester on a recent warm Friday afternoon. “I’m not going to beat around the bush anymore. That’s what the data says.”
But as the oat mafia looks to the future, they’re struggling with a basic marketing question: Who will actually buy these oats they’re growing?
