On March 23, 2023 — 61 days after his arrest — Guertin emailed his private defense counsel Bruce Rivers a research memo concluding that Minn. Stat. § 609.667(3) does not criminalize the possession of privately made firearms under federal law. On August 6, 2025, the Minnesota Supreme Court issued its published opinion in State v. Vagle, A23-0863, holding exactly that. The opinion was released 20 hours and 32 minutes after Guertin named the court's 426-day withholding of the opinion on the record in 8th Circuit Case 25-2476 on August 5, 2025 at 1:28 PM. The ruling nullified Counts II, III, and IV against Guertin by operation of law. 257 days later, the charges are still on his docket, still classified as felonies, still with Hennepin County Attorney as the prosecuting agency.
The current MCRO docket for State of Minnesota v. Matthew D. Guertin, 27-CR-23-1886, pulled on March 29, 2026 at 5:29 PM, lists four felony charges tied to the events of January 21, 2023 in Minnetonka. Three of the four cite a single statute — Minn. Stat. § 609.667(3). That is the statute the Minnesota Supreme Court struck down 257 days ago in State v. Vagle. It has not been dismissed, amended, consolidated, or annotated on the docket since.
| Count | Charge | Statute | Level | Post-Vagle Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| I | Dangerous Weapons — Reckless Discharge of Firearm Within a Municipality | 609.66.1a(a)(3) | Felony | Unaffected |
| II | Firearm-Serial Number — Receive/Possess With No Serial Number | 609.667(3) | Felony | Nullified · A23-0863 · 2025-08-06 |
| III | Firearm-Serial Number — Receive/Possess With No Serial Number | 609.667(3) | Felony | Nullified · A23-0863 · 2025-08-06 |
| IV | Firearm-Serial Number — Receive/Possess With No Serial Number | 609.667(3) | Felony | Nullified · A23-0863 · 2025-08-06 |
The docket was pulled 257 days after the Minnesota Supreme Court published Vagle. Counts II, III, and IV have not been amended, dismissed, consolidated, or annotated. They are listed — today — as felonies under the statute the Supreme Court held does not reach the conduct alleged.
Sixty-one days after his arrest, Matt Guertin emailed his privately retained defense counsel Bruce Rivers a four-source research memo concluding that the three counts under § 609.667(3) were not sustainable under Minnesota or federal law. The timestamp on the email is 2023-03-23 17:34:21 UTC — 12:34 PM Central. The email authenticates DKIM/SPF‑PASS out of ProtonMail. Rivers forwarded it to his own inbox four minutes later. A four-email thread followed the same afternoon, with a final follow-up on March 24, 2023 at 4:26 PM Central.
What the memo laid out, in 2023, was the reading the Minnesota Supreme Court adopted in 2025: federal law does not require serial numbers on privately made firearms, and Minnesota has not established an independent serial-number regime that reaches them. Nothing was filed with the court. Counts II, III, and IV stayed on the docket.
“Federal law explicitly allows individuals to manufacture personal-use firearms and imposes no requirement to apply serial numbers to such privately built firearms.”
Guertin, Emergency TRO Motion, 8th Cir. 25-2476, Doc. 06 at p. 22 (Aug 5, 2025) — restating the conclusion of the March 23, 2023 research memo two years and four months later.
Oral argument in State v. Vagle, A23-0863, was held en banc at the Minnesota State Capitol on June 5, 2024. The case presented one question: whether Minn. Stat. § 609.667(3) criminalizes possession of a firearm without a serial number when the firearm is not required to have one under federal law. On August 4, 2025 — 425 days later — Guertin pulled every comparable post-en-banc criminal pre-trial case in the Minnesota Supreme Court's record dating back to September 2014 and put the comparison on paper.
The result was not "slow." It was off the distribution entirely.
“This strongly suggests that the decision has already been reached and would likely be favorable to Appellant, effectively nullifying the three unconstitutional firearm charges and leaving only the reckless discharge count, which carries a maximum two-year sentence.”
Guertin, Emergency TRO Motion, 8th Cir. 25-2476, Doc. 06 at p. 23 · filed 2025-08-05 at 1:28 PM Central
Guertin named the delay on the record at 1:28 PM Central on Tuesday, August 5, 2025. The Minnesota Supreme Court released its opinion at 10:00 AM Central on Wednesday, August 6, 2025. Between the two events — from the moment the 8th Circuit clerk stamped Doc. 06 to the moment the Minnesota Appellate Courts Case Management System stamped Opinion-Published on A23-0863 — 20 hours and 32 minutes elapsed.
The Minnesota Supreme Court's syllabus in State v. Vagle, A23-0863 (Minn. Aug. 6, 2025), reads in full:
“Minnesota Statutes section 609.667(3) (2024) criminalizes the possession of a firearm without a serial number only when the firearm must have a serial number under federal law.”
“Reversed and remanded.”
Thissen, J., writing for the majority · Gaïtas, J., took no part · Hudson, C.J., and Procaccini, J., dissenting
Applied to Guertin: he built an AR-15, a Glock-19, and a Glock-23 for personal use in the summer of 2020. Federal law does not require privately made firearms to carry serial numbers. Under Vagle, Counts II, III, and IV do not state an offense. The majority's holding does that work automatically — no discretionary reading is required, no additional motion is required, and the statutory analysis admits of no alternative outcome on the facts the State itself charged.
The dissent by Chief Justice Hudson is a 4,766-word, sixteen-page argument whose practical conclusion — as Guertin's own Judicial Notice motion observes — is that Guertin could have complied with the statute by engraving “1,” “2,” and “3” on the three frames. Even the dissent does not argue that the charges were valid as filed. It argues only that a different form of self-selected numbering would have satisfied the statute.
Within six days of publication, seven Minnesota sources — from Anders Erickson's own law firm (counsel of record for Vagle) to Republican state senators to KARE 11 — reported the same thing: the Minnesota Supreme Court had held that the statute underpinning "ghost gun" charges does not reach privately built personal-use firearms. The conclusion was not novel to lawyers in the state. It was the reading Guertin's research memo had reached 865 days earlier.
On October 4, 2025, Guertin filed a formal Motion for Judicial Notice under Fed. R. Evid. 201(b)(2) in 8th Cir. 25-2476, asking the Court to take notice of three facts: that he had predicted the outcome of the 426-day deliberation within 21 hours; that the Chief Justice's 4,766-word dissent amounted to the proposition that scratching "1," "2," and "3" onto the three frames would have avoided the charges; and that the majority opinion contains a provably false factual claim about a Minnesota DNR firearms auction that compressed six unserialized firearms from a private Hiller auction into the record as evidence of state-sanctioned unserialized sales.
Six exhibits accompany the motion: MSC-A (the opinion itself, 45 pages, SHA-256 hashed); MSC-B and MSC-C (the actual MN DNR auction pages showing every firearm did have a serial number); MSC-D (the Hiller auction page); MSC-E (the Minnesota Appellate Courts Case Management screen captures reproduced in § 04 above); and MSC-F (the statistical outlier graph reproduced in § 03).
“This sequence establishes that Appellant's statement was validated as being 100% factually accurate less than 21 hours after being made.”
Motion for Judicial Notice, 8th Cir. 25-2476, Doc. 20.1 at p. 3 · filed October 5, 2025
Two days after Guertin filed the Motion for Judicial Notice, a Rule 20 calendar hearing went forward on Zoom before Referee Lori Skibbie. The attorney-client conference preceding the hearing was recorded. Raissa Carpenter, Guertin's appointed public defender, opened with Vagle.
That is Guertin's appointed defense counsel, on the record, acknowledging that the charges are not valid — and saying in the same breath that the competency framework will be used to prevent litigating it. The contradiction is the argument. One person in the exchange has the Minnesota Supreme Court's published syllabus in front of them. The other person on the exchange has the state's procedural machinery in front of them. Both are present in the same meeting, on the same case, about the same three charges, with the same filing date, and the answer is "I hear you."