ST. PAUL, Minn. – A man convicted of dealing methamphetamine out of a Rochester storage unit will remain in prison.
Brian Ven Vangrevenhof, 40 of Inver Grove Heights, was sentenced in June 2018 to eight years and 11 months behind bars after an Olmsted County jury found him guilty of 1st degree drug sales and 2nd degree drug possession.
Vangrevenhof appealed his conviction on five grounds: an out-of-court statement by a co-defendant should not have been admitted at his trial, pawn shop receipts that could have explained the large amount of cash found with Vangrevenhof were excluded, he was prejudiced by a jury instruction in open court he did not agree to, social media messages on his phone were excluded at trial, and the jury’s viewing of law enforcement body-camera footage of a co-defendant’s arrest was interrupted.
The Minnesota Court of Appeals has rejected all of those arguments. It found the statement was admissible, the receipts were unconfirmed hearsay, the jury instruction was not prejudicial, Vangrevenhof’s defense attorney never tried to introduce the social media messages as evidence, and says Vengrevenhof provided no legal authority or argument on how brief interruptions in the showing of body-camera footage could have affected his trial.
