Christa J. Groshek

Ninety Minutes

Philip Miller had spent thirty-four years in Minnesota courtrooms, nearly a decade of them as the elected county attorney of Benton County, before he sat at the other table. In 2021 he was charged with second-degree criminal sexual conduct involving a complainant who was fifteen and with whom the statute says he had a significant relationship. Because the prosecuting office was his own, the case traveled: charged in Benton County, tried in Mille Lacs County, prosecuted by lawyers from Hennepin County.

Christa Groshek built the defense around a step the investigation never took. The allegation had surfaced in private messages on the girl's social-media account, seen by a family member and reported to police in January 2021. Investigators took statements. Nobody conducted a structured forensic interview — the protocol that tests an account for circumstances, sequence, detail and outside influence before charges are built on it.

Groshek retained two experts, one on memory and one on forensic interviewing, and used them to hold apart two things the state's case treated as one thing: an account sincerely given, and an account reliably tested. The theory was never that the complainant had lied. It was that no method had ever been applied that could tell anyone which was which. "The next step needs to be taken: a thorough forensic interview."

The trial ran two weeks. On the evening of Friday, December 8, 2023, the jury returned not guilty on both counts. Groshek put the deliberation at about ninety minutes.

Groshek's defense centered on the missing forensic interview: without that structured step, she argued, the record lacked the testing needed to distinguish a sincerely given account from a reliably tested one.

A DANCO Is Not an Order for Protection

In Isenhower v. Isenhower, the encounter began in February 2022 when a Hennepin County man went to lunch with his father-in-law and brother-in-law. The server assigned to their table was his stepsister. Ten and a half years earlier he had pleaded guilty to sexually abusing her, and the domestic-abuse no-contact order imposed with his probation had expired the previous August.

The district court found the encounter accidental and credited his testimony that he had not known where she worked. It issued an order for protection against him anyway — and it got there by treating the expired DANCO as though it were a prior OFP, which let the court apply the lower threshold Minnesota reserves for extending or replacing an order that already exists.

Groshek and Aaron Roy took the appeal, and their argument was about which instrument is which. An order for protection is a civil remedy, initiated by the person seeking it under chapter 518B, with a hearing at which the respondent can contest it. A DANCO belongs to a criminal case, comes at the prosecutor's request or the court's own motion, carries no separate contested hearing, and answers to a different burden and different penalties. The Domestic Abuse Act says its proceedings are in addition to other civil and criminal remedies. It never mentions DANCOs at all.

On June 26, 2023 the Court of Appeals reversed in a published opinion, and the rule is precedent: a DANCO is not an OFP for purposes of Minnesota Statutes section 518B.01, subdivision 6a. The respondent filed no brief, and the court decided the appeal on the merits.

The reversal required a petitioner in her position to meet the statutory standard for an initial order for protection. Classification decided the proof required and the process due.

The Code inside the Breath Machine

Minnesota once proved intoxication with a number produced by an Intoxilyzer 5000EN, and the statute let that number into evidence without anyone first testifying that the instrument was trustworthy. The machine could be inspected. The software could not: more than 1,100 pages of C and assembly code running two processors, held by the manufacturer in Kentucky. The state's case rested on instructions nobody in the state was allowed to read.

Groshek was one of the private defense lawyers on the membership roll of the MSCJ Source Code Coalition — the Minnesota Society for Criminal Justice's cost-sharing arrangement for the source-code fight, in which member attorneys funded a common team of software and breath-testing experts and received their final report.

The discovery litigation went well. In 2007 the Supreme Court turned back the Commissioner of Public Safety's attempt to block an order requiring production of the code in Dale Underdahl's license-revocation case, and the State disclosed it. Requests then became standard practice: production was ordered in more than 4,200 cases across at least sixty-nine counties.

Two years later the court set the price of admission. Underdahl and Timothy Brunner had each won a production order in a criminal prosecution and each lost it in the Court of Appeals; in 2009 the Supreme Court split them apart. Underdahl had advanced no theory connecting the code to his defense, and his order fell. Brunner had submitted source-code definitions, a computer scientist's written testimony, and an example of another breath-testing machine's defects — enough to show that examining the code might bear on guilt or innocence — and his stood. That showing has been the test ever since: name a plausible defect, tie it to the disputed test, and support the request with material explaining what review of the code could reveal.

What the Hearing Decided

In January 2010 the Supreme Court assigned every source-code challenge in the state — thousands of implied-consent petitions and criminal DWI cases — to a single judge, Jerome Abrams. The evidentiary hearing ran through December of that year.

The statewide rulings drew a line between a general software challenge and a defect tied to a particular result. On June 27, 2012 the Supreme Court affirmed findings that instruments reporting a numerical result were reliable and unaffected by the alleged defects, so evidence about those general defects would not be admitted at individual trials and hearings. Three justices dissented, reading the rulings as leaving an accused no practical way to contest the number.

A distinct ruling survived for an instrument reporting a "deficient sample" while running the 240 version of the software. That result was unreliable unless other evidence or observation showed the deficiency was not the software's doing. A deficient sample can be treated as a refusal, and a refusal costs a license. Within a few years the State had retired the 5000EN.

Together with Brunner, the litigation left a concrete access rule: a defendant can ask what instructions produced a number when he can identify a plausible defect and say what examination of the code could reveal. The machine that could not be questioned is gone, and the rule for questioning its successors remains.

Two Rulings before Trial

In two pretrial matters, Groshek focused the motion on the element the state had to prove.

In one, a traffic stop ended with the vehicle towed and the passenger searched afterwards. Groshek separated the three authorities involved: to stop the car, to tow it, and to search a person. Each requires its own justification, and the state had proof of only two. The court found the search unsupported by probable cause, suppressed what it produced, and dismissed the fifth-degree possession charge before trial.

In the other, ten felony possession counts rested on a statute requiring proof that the images depicted minors. The motion went to that element alone, and when the state could not establish the ages of the individuals depicted, the court ended all ten counts before trial.

The Wisdom of Juvenile Court

Groshek's first job as a lawyer was at the Legal Rights Center in Minneapolis, defending children. A year later she moved to the Hennepin County Public Defender's Office, carrying delinquency cases and representing families in child protection, and after three years in juvenile court she transferred to the adult felony trial team. In her first year there, she tried more cases to juries than some private defense attorneys do in ten years, and 80 percent ended in acquittal. She later wrote a chapter on what representing a child in criminal court actually asks of a lawyer.

One early case is the one she tells. The client would not work with her, so she kept coming back — meeting him again, and again, until they could prepare together. He was acquitted. A child cannot instruct a lawyer he does not trust, and a lawyer cannot learn what happened from a client who will not speak to her. The meetings were the case.

Minnesota's juvenile court is organized around the least drastic step that will restore lawful conduct, which gives juvenile defense two jobs at once: test the state's proof, and put before the court the intervention that actually fits the child. The stakes run well past disposition. An adjudication can shape schooling, housing and work years after the file closes, and can count against a young person at a later sentencing.

Three Lawyers, One Client

In 2018 Groshek formalized how the firm staffs a file. A case manager serves as attorney of record and holds the client relationship, the strategy and the litigation. A managing attorney supervises. A research attorney develops the motions, the statutory analysis and the appellate issues.

The third chair exists to be adversarial: someone who did not write the trial theory tests it against the record before the state does. The first exists so that the client keeps one lawyer throughout, whatever the case turns into — a suppression issue, a license investigation, an appeal. The structure builds adversarial testing into the defense's own preparation before the state conducts its cross-examination.

From Advertising to the Felony Trial Team

Before law school Groshek was an advertising account executive. She has called the work "vacuous," and left it to defend indigent clients, doing exactly that through law school and for five years after it.

She clerked at the Washington County Public Defender's Office as a student, then for Judge Thomas Armstrong of the Washington County District Court in Stillwater, and graduated cum laude from William Mitchell College of Law in 2000. She has been in private practice since 2005 and opened Groshek Law in 2006; the firm now works from its own building in Minneapolis's North Loop, appearing in state and federal courts across the metro area and greater Minnesota. She has tried more than fifty cases to juries.