03-04-2025
Bill would rein in aggressive drug-free zone prosecutions
Getty Images
A new bill before the Legislature would dramatically reduce the size of school and park zones that some prosecutors rely on to enhance criminal charges and penalties against otherwise low-level drug offenders.
Under current law, school and park zones contain 'the area within 300 feet or one city block, whichever distance is greater,' of the school or park property line.
The DFL-sponsored legislation (SF3207/HF2980) would reduce that buffer to 100 feet across the board.
People who possess drugs or attempt to sell them in school or park zones face stiffer penalties under a Drug War-era law aiming to protect children from the harms of drug use.
In reality, few people ensnared by the law are actually attempting to target kids. Because of the way the law is written, prosecutors can charge people with prohibited zone violations simply for driving past a school incidentally during the course of their day.
In rural Polk County, for instance, a Reformer investigation found that prosecutors have filed prohibited zone charges against people who used drugs inside a home located within a block of a school; a homeless man who walked across a bridge near a park; and a woman who parked her car at an apartment complex within a block of a city park.
Statewide, few prosecutors apply the law this way. Polk County, for instance, is home to just 0.5% of the state population but prosecutors there charge 40% of the state's prohibited zone violations.
Although Polk County has successfully defended its use of the statute in appellate courts, defense attorneys have argued it's a violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the U.S. Constitution. The uneven application of the law is a driver of the reform effort in the Legislature this year.
'This legislation is the start of a much-needed conversation on reforming drug-free zones in Minnesota to ensure the state has uniformity around criminal penalties,' said Jenny Catchings, a state policy manager with the Justice Action Network, which supports the bill. 'This law has been misconstrued — to the point that there are valid reasons to see constitutional rights issues — and Minnesota now has a system of justice-by-geography around drug-free zones, with some counties as notable outliers.'
The reform bill would dramatically shrink the areas defined as school or park zones in Minnesota. The map below, for instance, illustrates how drug-free zones would change in East Grand Forks, the largest city in Polk County.
In the map, green areas are parks and plum-colored areas are schools. The regions shaded peach, representing distances of 300 feet or one city block beyond park and school property lines, are also considered drug-free zones under current law. The dark brown outlines show the much smaller extent of those buffers under the proposed law.
In practice, the one-block provision of current law means entire neighborhoods become drug-free zones if a tiny park is located within them, or if a neighborhood abuts the city's sprawling Greenway: the vast natural area surrounding the Red and Red Lake rivers.
The illustration of drug-free zones under current law should be considered an approximation, as the statutes do not define a 'block' for the purposes of calculating the extent of a drug-free zone. State courts have held that for drug-free zones in places with regular street grids, the buffer encompasses all eight blocks surrounding the block a school or park is located on.
But considerable uncertainty remains: What about situations where streets form 'blocks' of irregular shape or size? What about cases where parkland, like the East Grand Forks Greenway, extends partially into a block? What happens near the margins of a town, where the distance between two roads can be a quarter mile or more?
Those ambiguities have not been addressed by the courts, meaning an enterprising prosecutor could file drug-free zone charges under any number of edge-case scenarios and try to get a judge to go along with it (Polk County Attorney Greg Widseth did not respond to a request for comment).
The reform bill would eliminate all of that uncertainty, replacing it with an across-the-board 100-foot buffer. But it would still leave the door open to aggressive prosecutions.
Nothing would stop prosecutors from charging drug-free zone violations for simply driving past a school, as is practice in Polk County. And in a city like East Grand Forks, which is bounded entirely on one side by a large tract of parkland, it would remain impossible to traverse the city without passing through a drug-free zone.
The bill's odds of passage this year are uncertain, as most legislative committees have a deadline of April 4 to advance bills under consideration. And with a 67-67 House, bills need bipartisan support to reach the necessary 68 votes needed for passage.
