Disorder in the Court

What was behind Judge Dale Wolf's erratic behavior during the Donald Blom trial?

By Kevin Featherly

There was something awkward, maybe even a little troubling that day in September 1999 when Larry Oakes saw the first of a series of notices taped to the walls of the Carlton County courthouse. Sixth District Circuit Judge Dale A. Wolf personally had seen to it that the notes were posted there, and in places throughout the building where anyone passing by couldn't possibly have missed them.

"They were like general postings to the public, courthouse staff, anyone who happened to be in the courthouse," said Oakes. The Star Tribune reporter covers Northern Minnesota for the Minneapolis newspaper, and Oakes was there that day, as he had been for much of the past three months, covering the first-degree murder case of Donald Albin Blom. Wolf's note, recalls Oakes, said that being a judge in the case had become a terrific burden. "He was asking the public's patience in sorting it out," Oakes says.

No one could have known it at the time, but what was happening before the reporter's eyes was part of an unfolding story in which a man, holding a very powerful position of civic authority and working under extreme stress, was about to have a mental blowout.

Today, Dale Wolf refuses to discuss the Blom case, at least until after Blom's pending conviction appeal is complete. But he does yield clues about the rampaging bipolar mood disorder that put him at center stage of an almost Shakespearean drama. "I think one of the things I've learned," Wolf confessed to Law and Politics in late May, "is that you take ownership of problems that are not necessarily yours, and you also feel that you can correct or get everything back on track, or solve problems. And you can't always do that. Trial judges are very limited. We can't always cure everybody else's problems, or make things right or get things back on track."

"Again," Wolf hastens to add, "this is not me commenting on that case. I don't want anyone thinking I am."

It was a peculiar case. Blom, 50, was a college-educated, six-time sex offender, standing accused of abducting, strangling and incinerating a pretty 19-year-old Moose Lake convenience-store clerk, Katie Poirier, in May 1999. The case had seen two big-shot Twin Cities lawyers fighting in open court over Blom's business, only to see them both disappear after Blom proved indigent. (Just as strangely, one would reappear later.) The suspect had already issued a faltering, confusing, almost cagey confession to police, after which his public defender turned around and disclosed it all in full detail on the six o'clock news.

Yet, abruptly, Blom recanted his statement, sought a trial. Arraignment hearings, normally the most routine portion of any criminal trial, were held secretly. Through it all, the media spotlight shone more intensely on the Poirier murder trial than on any Minnesota trial in recent memory. Oakes, the reporter, could easily see why Judge Wolf was stressed. The case was patently weird. But to expose personal feelings so publicly, so baldly, in written public notices on the courthouse walls? Though Oakes remembers seeing nothing alarming about Wolf's behavior in open court, this felt wrong. "It's something you just wouldn't normally see a judge do," Oakes says.

Still, compared to what was coming, Wolf's written pleas would soon seem as mundane as the arraignment calendars hanging at the courtroom entrances. Gripped by a desire to do right by a grieving family in his community, Wolf was beginning to pull legal levers not truly at his disposal, to lose his grip on judicial objectivity. If not his sanity. This weird case was about to explode into total chaos.

Good Deal Gone Bad

For a very short time, it looked like justice would dispose of Donald Blom swiftly.

The suspect had struck an unusual deal involving everyone from Carlton County prosecutors and state Corrections Commissioner Sheryl Ramstad Hvaas to federal prosecutors (Blom simultaneously faced federal weapons charges). Under its terms, Blom would serve a life sentence without parole in prison of his choice and his family's assets would not be seized. He only had to plead guilty to Poirer's murder. On Sept. 8, 1999, against the advice of his lawyers, Donald Blom confessed. He described forcing the girl into his pickup, driving her to his property 15 minutes from DJ's Conoco, and then, for no reason he could describe, spending a chilling 20 to 30 minutes strangling the girl. Finally, she died. He curled the petite corpse into a fire pit and lit a fire. After a while, he headed home to his wife and kids in Richfield.

In some ways, this confession strains logic. Its transcript suggests that Blom is unaware of or unwilling to discuss key details; he provides little verifiable information that presumably he couldn't have gleaned watching the ubiquitous videotaped abduction on TV in the weeks between the murder and his late July arrest. Blom remembers virtually nothing about any words spoken between him and his victim. He doesn't recall luring the girl to the back of the convenience store, though a then-unpublicized segment of the store videotape shows it clearly. (A prosecutor is kind enough to remind him.) Also, Blom claims he used no liquid accelerant to burn the body, just wooden boards that supposedly were adequate to incinerate the body so thoroughly as to leave behind only a charred tooth and a few blackened bone fragments that contained only unusable traces of DNA. Anyway, there were barrels of fuel oil in his yard. At one point in his testimony, Blom even hints that the bones in the fire pit might not be Poirier's. At that point, the confession transcript shows, Blom's public defender Rodney Brodin abruptly jumps in to warn his client that his plea agreement would be void if a new crime were introduced into testimony. Blom shuts up; investigators do not press the issue.

Afterwards, in one of the case's oddest moments, Brodin went before television cameras, disclosed his client's confession, revealed the existence of the bone fragments in the fire pit; Brodin later defended the move saying the confession would have been made public by police anyway. The lawyer spoke openly about Blom wanting to serve his sentence at the North Dakota State Penitentiary in Bismarck, a relatively safe facility still close to his family. In addition, Brodin said the agreement allowed Blom's wife to keep his pickup, while authorities agreed not to foreclose on the Moose Lake property. He didn't stop short of expressing his opinion of his client's decision.

"As a parent, I certainly think morally he did the right thing," Brodin told reporters. "As an attorney, that isn't what I would have advised him to do." Richard Holmstrom, the public defender representing Blom in the simultaneous federal weapons case, failed to spy the same silver lining. "They're offering my client a bad deal," he complained.

Indeed, Blom came to think so too.

At a Sept. 16 plea hearing, the accused man refused to plead guilty. At that closed-door hearing, Brodin argued he was now opposing a guilty plea because, on reflection, the confession seemed so dubious. "I don't want to go in and plead him, and be coming back in front of you two weeks from now ... with some kind of motion to say there's something wrong with this case," Brodin said. Without a plea, the agreement fell apart. The next day, federal prosecutors backed out.

"That was the departure point, I think, from reality," said Oakes, who watched the entire case unfold. "That's where (Wolf) started to believe that the (defense) lawyers sabotaged the agreement, that they -- not Blom -- wanted it to fall apart."

Whatever his reasons, Wolf wouldn't take "not guilty" for an answer.

He began working day and night, sometimes skipping sleep, negotiating frantically "to try to get this thing back on track." The judge contacted federal prosecutors, representatives of the U.S. Attorney General, at least one federal judge. He asked the Poirier family to pressure federal prosecutors to revive the deal. Wolf ordered unusual private meetings with attorneys in chambers. He put a gag order on Blom and his attorneys. In closed arraignment hearings on Sept. 22 and 23, the judge chose to speak directly to Blom, virtually ignoring defense attorneys. He cajoled, soothed, coaxed Blom to consider the deal if it could be rebuilt. Incongruously, Wolf appealed to the nobility of the six-time convicted sex predator.

"You made a personal decision," Wolf said in one hearing, "to end the aguish for the Poirer family ... putting your own family first and your own children, ending problems for them. And in that vein you wished to go forward on this matter short of trial. ... As a human being, I've got to tell you that I admire that. That is, I think, noble."

Brodin was startled. "The judge is not supposed to actually care whether the defendant enters a plea or not," Brodin said recently. "The judge is supposed to be there to protect the due process." If a suspect agrees to enter a plea, then changes his mind, that's his right. Judges are supposed to accept it and move on. Worried about the way things were going, Brodin filed papers with Sixth District Chief Judge John T. Oswald seeking to remove Wolf from the case, with cause. "It was just a gut feeling at that point," he says.

Fred Friedman, the district's chief public defender, got involved around this time. After Blom's latest plea refusal, Wolf went over defense attorneys' heads and appealed to their boss Friedman. He did that in a phone call to Friedman, who was in the state of Virginia attending a conference. On the night of Sept. 25, Friedman was awakened by a phone call in his motel room it was Wolf, wanting to discuss the case. He asked Friedman to dismiss Brodin and Piper-Maurer. The judge, who had known Friedman since 1966, beseeched the chief to take the over as Blom's attorney. Friedman refused.

Friedman returned to Minnesota on Sept. 27 and Wolf wanted to see him. In their meeting, Wolf gave him a "bill of particulars" detailing what he considered unethical and incompetent behavior on the part of Friedman's public defenders. The document accused the defense of fumbling opportunities to get DNA samples tested quickly. It criticized Brodin and Piper-Maurer for dragging their feet when they knew an Oct. 25 federal weapons trial was looming. And Wolf blasted their plan to challenge Blom's confession. "Any argument by counsel to suppress the confession will only bolster the record regarding concerns about competency of counsel (and I worry about ethical problems)," Wolf wrote.

Two days later, the judge again talked to Friedman by phone, asking him one final time if the defense thought the confession should be challenged. Yes, Friedman said, it could, should, and would be. On the spot, Wolf kicked the public defenders office off the case. Public defender Holmstrom remained in place to defend the weapons charges.

"You need to understand," Friedman told Law and Politics, "(Wolf) has no authority to remove us, no authority to fire me. He's got no control over me. I don't work for the court. I work for the state."

That same day, Sept. 29, Wolf made yet another unorthodox move. He reappointed Anthony Torres as Blom's attorney. Wolf reeled Torres back in with a desperate phone call, the transcript of which might provide the first real hints of Wolf's deteriorating mental state. In it, Wolf pleads with the Richfield attorney to come back on the case in a limited appointment, giving Torres permission to drop out anytime he chose, a very unusual condition. "I've had so many sleepless nights in this matter," the judge moaned. "I have many dilemmas in this case, believe me, already."

"I certainly will give it a shot, Judge," Torres told Wolf, "as a favor to the court."

Final Descent

The end scenes of Judge Wolf's odd drama would now unfold.

On Sept. 30, Wolf issued an order barring Blom from discussing the case with any other attorney but Torres. That same day, State Public Defender John Stuart asked the state Board on Judicial Standards to investigate Wolf for making the sudden switch in attorneys, calling Wolf's behavior "an intolerable interference with the attorney-client relationship.''

On Oct. 4, Torres finally appeared in court representing Blom. Again held behind closed doors, it was yet another strange session. Wolf spent most of it confessing to errors he had made in the case, while detailing his version of the trial's chronology. His tone was overwrought, angry, put-upon. Wolf admitted he had mistaken Blom's first attorney, Steven Meshbesher, for a more renowned relative, attorney Ronald Meshbesher. Mea culpa, the judge said, he should not have allowed Torres and Meshbesher to argue over Blom's business in the courtroom. He also erred, he said, by "ignoring my own family's grief." But his greatest mistake, he suggested, was that he had ever trusted Fred Friedman.

Even at this late date, with the walls closing in, Wolf clung to hope of reviving a plea agreement. "I still think that we could try to do something with the commissioner of corrections," he told the defendant. To that end, the judge continued to ply Blom's emotions. "I don't have the stomach much more to see the Poirier family be pulled in and out of this court like a yo-yo. I just can't stand that," the judge told his defendant. "That's just cruel to them."

Friedman and Brodin issued detailed memoranda to district Chief Judge Oswald the next day, urging him to remove Wolf immediately, and to reinstate them as Blom's attorneys. In his memo, Brodin pointedly accused Wolf of dumping Blom's legal team so that "someone else" would elicit from him the desired guilty plea. Blom piped in with his own letter, attached to Brodin's affidavit. He had never asked for a new lawyer, Blom wrote. He was angry "that the court or anyone could (do) this to me and claim it was 'in my best interest.'" Oswald scheduled a hearing for that later in the week to consider Wolf's status.

According to a report in the Duluth News Tribune newspaper, Wolf didn't go to bed the night that night. He stayed up, working. Around dawn, he began unsealing confidential documents, including the transcripts of several closed court sessions. At 5 a.m., he started leaving messages with reporters, notifying them about some of his court filings. He lodged a formal complaint requesting that Friedman be forced to step down as chief public defender. A little later, disheveled and unshaven, Wolf taped yet another a statement to the Carlton County Courthouse doors. No one, it said, has any right to try influencing a judge's decisions.

Oct. 8 arrived. Wolf didn't attend the Oswald hearing about his conduct that day in Duluth, nor did he send a lawyer to represent him. Instead, he stayed in Carlton and set off a bombshell.

In the weirdest event of the entire trial, Wolf wrote and issued a fustian, paranoiac complaint and sent it to state Lawyers Professional Responsibility Board. It charged attorneys Meshbesher, Brodin, Piper-Maurer, Friedman and State Public Defender Stuart with unethical conduct. In addition, Friedman and Stuart were accused of attempting to subvert the independence of the judiciary. Wolf demanded that both be disbarred.

On its own, that was an astonishing move. But it was nothing compared with the enraged screed that accompanied the order's affidavit, which also was sent out to the professional responsibility board. A few samples are illustrative:

• To Donald Blom: "Let's assume your defense team was instead a baseball team. Things haven't gone good for the Twins this season. So I have brought Sammy Sosa in to bat for you."

• To Steve Meshbesher: "The courts of Minnesota know Ronald Meshbesher, and you are no Ronald Meshbesher! Enough said."

• To Friedman, Brodin, Piper-Maurer and Stuart the tone turned bombastic (the emphases are Wolf's): "(Blom's) attorneys have certainly NOT given the Poirier family, nor the Blom children (nor even the Wolf children) any peace of mind."

• "You can NOT come back into the case. Even if it means less chance to get publicity."

• "It is NOT good lawyering to take a TRIAL court order of removal of clearly incompetent attorneys to another trial court in the same district. Leave Judge Oswald out of this."

• "Mr. Friedman ... is unfit to supervise. ... He must be REMOVED from office. If no one else has the courage to say so, so be it. But Mr. Friedman is never to step foot in MY courtroom again. Do I make myself clear?"

• "You obviously are not from the William Mitchell Law School, class of '74, but I am."

• "You are a disgrace to the legal profession."

The Lawyers Professional Responsibility Board received the screed on Oct. 11. One day later, Judge John T. Oswald removed Wolf from the case.

In his order, Oswald said Wolf had clearly "interjected himself into the plea negotiations and plea process in both a personal and emotional manner," obliterating his impartiality. Oswald immediately replaced Wolf with 45-year-old Judge Gary Pagliacetti. The case would be moved out of Carlton and tried in the Virginia, Minn., county courthouse.

"Looking back," Oswald said, "I can honestly say I don't think I had a whole lot of choice in light of what happened. It had to be done."

"I think the judge felt that when it appeared a plea bargain was imminent that he had done his community a service," Brodin says. "And he felt offended that this service that he had given to his community was falling apart. And I think that was part of what was leading to his emotional problem."

The Blom trial went on without Wolf. And it continued to have more than its fair share of strange twists, particularly owing to Blom's media-hungry behavior. But in general, it became a more normal trial with Pagliacetti in control. Blom eventually was convicted of first-degree murder, though some legal experts have said that, in light of the Wolf escapades, that conviction might be vulnerable on appeal. That appeal is pending.

The Aftermath

A day after Oswald's decision removing him from the case, Wolf collapsed. He was hospitalized, his family said, for treatment of "exhaustion." A year later, Wolf publicly acknowledged his a bipolar mood disorder, once known as manic-depression. He issued a public apology to the attorneys he had blasted. More recently, Wolf said that exhaustion had played a real role in his breakdown.

"When you have a situational manic episode," Wolf told Law and Politics, "the more sleep you lose moving forward at first the more tired you are. But then suddenly you've got energy, suddenly you're energized. And then, at some point, you run out of energy.

"In my situation, I was happy," Wolf says. "It was one of those late onsets in life and I readily responded. I know how important a good night's sleep is, and that was really the magic cure for me. I've learned a lot, but that was the biggest lesson."

The situation had an almost immediate if subtle ripple effect on the state's judiciary. An informal task force, the Judicial Stress Board, already had formed in April 1999. But it got serious after Wolf got sick, and began drafting a set of guidelines aimed at helping Minnesota judges, among the most overworked and underpaid in the United States, to help them cope with the immense stress of their jobs. (See accompanying article.)

Isanti County Judge James Dehn, his district's chief judge, is a member of the state Judicial Standards Board and is co-chair of the Judicial Stress Committee. He thinks stress in the Blom case got the better of Dale Wolf, pushing him over the edge. Dehn, who says he has attended judicial classes taught by Wolf, regards him as "an excellent judge" and "a very caring human being."

Dehn said he thinks judicial isolation, a common complaint, played a big part in what happened to Wolf. Judges' decisions are supposed to be totally independent, their momentous decisions unsullied by influence even from other judges. They have no sounding boards, they don't discuss their cases for input the way attorneys in a law firm do. That's hard enough. Add to that the intense loneliness that results from occupying a position regarded as perhaps even more godlike than physicians, and you've got a recipe for a truly troubled human being.

Duluth attorney Larry Nord knows all about that. Nord is a former St. Louis County judicial officer, a position since eliminated by the Legislature that had full judicial authority, though with fewer administrative duties. Nord left the post well before it was eliminated to return to private practice. Isolation was a key reason. Nord wanted to rejoin the human race.

"People who used to call me by my first name wouldn't anymore. They'd call me 'Your Honor,' or 'Judge,' or something like that," he recalls. "People who used to tell you, 'You should do this differently to be more effective,' would no longer tell you that. And nobody would tell you if you did a good job or a bad job." Nord said he strongly suspects that Wolf, likewise, never got any feedback about his actions during the Blom case.

This year, Wolf got his feedback.

A month after announcing that the judge was cleared to return to duty after a voluntary 14-month medical leave, the Minnesota Board on Judicial Standards reprimanded Wolf on Jan. 10, 2001, calling his behavior in the Blom case "egregious and unacceptable." The board also made clear that his punishment would have been much worse but for the fact of Wolf's bipolar disorder -- and for the fact that he sought treatment.

His transition back to the bench was a gingerly affair. The Minnesota Supreme Court ordered that Wolf spend his first 60 days in Duluth working beside Oswald -- the same judge who booted him from the Blom trial. By late May, Oswald was giving his colleague solid reviews. Wolf had regained some of his old confidence, Oswald said. More importantly, the confidence of attorneys and prosecutors was beginning, bit by bit, to return.

"I would say that certainly there was initially a lingering sense of distrust, particularly by the public defenders," Oswald said. "But as time has gone on, that has tapered off and people are seeing that he's taking care of himself and getting proper rest and medication and he's basically back to normal. I don't really think that we're going to have any real long-term consequences from it."

That is, unless you count Rod Brodin. Brodin says he plans to take the judge at his word; he will never step foot in Wolf's courtroom again. Wolf's insults were very personal, Brodin recalls. His accusations put an entire community, already hungry for Blom's blood, at his throat. There were death threats. And Brodin says he's not alone in keeping away from Wolf. Other public defenders in the area, too, continue to file motions to have Wolf removed from their cases, he says, and with good reason.

"I think that what Judge Wolf did is hurting the judiciary," Brodin says. "I think that the judiciary needs to be conceived by the public as being totally neutral and detached from the case. ... Any time a judge decides a case before he has heard the evidence, it's a blow to justice."

Brodin says he fully believes the story that Wolf broke down, that a bipolar flare-up derailed his judgment, causing such damage to the case. And he thinks that there is a place for compassion for such a suffering man. But there's something else to consider, he said.

"I represent people every day that suffer from the same mental illness," Brodin said. "And I don't necessarily see the same compassion from the bench towards my clients that the judicial community seems to want to extend to Judge Wolf."

Originally published in Minnesota Law & Politics, October 2001

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Kevin Featherly, a former managing editor at Washington Post Newsweek Interactive, is a Minnesota journalist who covers politics and technology. He has authored or contributed to five previous books, Guide to Building a Newsroom Web Site (1998), The Wired Journalist (1999), Elements of Language (2001), Pop Music and the Press (2002) and Encyclopedia of New Media (2003). His byline has appeared in Editor & Publisher, the San Francisco Chronicle, the St. Paul Pioneer Press, Online Journalism Review and Minnesota Law and Politics, among other publications. In 2000, he was a media coordinator for Web, White & Blue, the first online presidential debates.

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Copyright 2004, by Kevin Featherly

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