Brian Pippitt is innocent. By a 6-1 vote, the commissioners of the Minnesota Conviction Review Unit, agreed, after an extensive, years-long investigation into Pippitt’s 2001 murder conviction. The Unit recommended that the 61-year-old be exonerated.
“We don’t have to find Mr. Pippitt innocent but I believe there is incredibly compelling evidence that he is. And for that I’m so sorry that you spent 26 years in prison,” said Commissioner Perry Moriearty.
Almost a year and a half later, Pippit remains incarcerated after the MCRU’s recommendation.
Pippitt was one of five Native American men charged with the murder of 84-year-old shopkeeper Evelyn Malin in 1998 in Aitkin County, about an hour’s drive West of Duluth, Minnesota. Despite a total absence of physical evidence connecting Pippitt and the other men to the crime, prosecutors alleged that they had broken into the victim’s store, to which her living quarters were attached, in order to steal cigarettes and beer, and murdered the deaf, crippled grandmother in the process. Neither cigarettes nor beer were missing.
While three of Pippit’s co-defendants received plea deals and one was acquitted by the judge during a trial, Pippitt fought the charges, was convicted and sentenced to life in prison.
Pippit has maintained his innocence throughout the entire process. “I did not commit this crime for which I have now served 26 years.” He said he turned down a plea deal because he wouldn’t admit to a crime he didn’t do. “I was not there when she was murdered. I have no involvement whatsoever. It was a crime I do not know who committed,” he said via video call from Stillwater FCI in Stillwater, Minnesota.
A re-examination of the evidence by forensic experts, and the recantations of two key witnesses who linked Pippitt to the crime, backed up his claims of innocence.
“I’ve never seen it where a statewide attorney general’s office has concluded someone was wrongfully incarcerated because they are innocent” and then they aren’t soon released, said Pippitt’s attorney, Jim Cousins of Centurion Ministries, a nonprofit dedicated to vindicating the wrongly convicted.
In the four years since the Minnesota Conviction Review Unit began accepting applications, it has only recommended relief in two other cases, underscoring how long, slow and uncertain a path to release can be, and how the vast majority of convictions have withstood closer scrutiny. Pippitt’s is the first case where the unit, after a two-year investigation and 181-page report that accuses law enforcement of malpractice in its investigation and prosecution of Pippitt, recommended full exoneration in June 2024.
His legal team filed to reopen the case in Aitkin County, a process they believed would lead to his freedom. But the County Attorney’s Office and Sherriff’s Office, who believe Pippitt’s attempt at freedom is filled with fabrications and amounts to an attack on the judicial system, is fighting the move, , and the case has stalled.
The next step comes this month, when the state Board of Pardons, composed of the governor, attorney general and chief justice, rules on a commutation. However, a commutation would free Pippitt but not exonerate him.
You can read more about Brian Pippit’s fight for freedom in “Minnesota Man Still in Prison for
Murder a Year After He Was Recommended to be Freed” in the Minnesota Star and Tribune, the newspaper of record in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
