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Crime, Law and Justice
Estelle Timar-Wilcox

Hennepin County authorities investigating after drug-laced paperwork found in jail

Hennepin County Public Safety Facility
The Hennepin County Public Safety Facility in Minneapolis
Matt Sepic | MPR News file

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Law enforcement officials are investigating after an inmate at the Hennepin County Jail was allegedly caught with legal paperwork laced with drugs. 

Authorities are trying to determine how the inmates acquired that paperwork — with a search warrant targeting an attorney who met with the inmate.

According to a search warrant affidavit filed in Hennepin County District Court on Monday, during a planned search at the jail on Dec. 31, a K-9 trained in detecting narcotics alerted to a bin containing several documents in an inmate’s cell. Authorities took the papers, and later confiscated additional paperwork from that inmate’s cell. Some of those documents tested positive for cocaine and fentanyl. 

The affidavit states that the jail’s logs of professional visits show the inmate’s only visitor for nearly two months before the paperwork was found was one attorney from Minneapolis.

The affidavit claims the same attorney also visited a second inmate who was reportedly heard on a recorded phone call in late December — to a person not identified — saying, “It is in the air, keep it sealed when you get it, don’t worry they won’t open it.”

“The only correspondence inmates can receive while in custody that is not examined, is legal mail brought in by an attorney,” the affidavit states.

The attorney allegedly signed in as a visitor and appeared on camera footage in the jail visiting the first inmate and leaving paperwork with him days before authorities found the drug-laced documents.

According to the affidavit, Hennepin County deputies searched the attorney’s trash and then her apartment in late January. Items from the trash and in the home returned positive drug test results. The search warrant filed Monday requested permission to search the attorney’s cell phone. 

MPR News is not naming the attorney because they have not been charged. In a statement, the attorney denied involvement in the incident.

The affidavit claims that there has been “a growing trend of paperwork being saturated in an unknown liquid substance. Once the substance dries, it remains on the paper, and it is delivered to incarcerated individuals” who then ingest it.

Minnesota Department of Corrections Commissioner Paul Schnell spoke with MPR News last year about similar issues in state prisons. The Department of Corrections last November implemented a new system in which mail to inmates is first sent to a third-party vendor in Maryland that copies those letters — with the copies being sent on to inmates. A separate process is in place for mail from attorneys to incarcerated clients.