What the Court's Own Public Directory Says

The Fourth Judicial District has 87 judicial officers listed on its public directory page. Four of them have presided over, bracketed, or been newly assigned to State of Minnesota v. Matthew D. Guertin, 27-CR-23-1886. Below are their biographies exactly as reproduced from the court's own public directory — not what anyone has alleged, but what the bench has itself chosen to publish. Whether you trust the dates, accreditations, and contents presented is entirely up to you.

Presiding / Probate & Mental Health

Judge William H. Koch

• Appointed: May 2007 by Governor Tim Pawlenty. Re-elected 2014, 2020.
• Prior federal service: Judge Advocate — United States Air Force, Andrews Air Force Base (1988–1991); Special Assistant U.S. Attorney — District of Maryland (1988–1990); Assistant U.S. Attorney — District of Minnesota (2000–2007).
• Awards: U.S. Secret Service "Certificate of Appreciation" (2004, 2007); U.S. Department of Justice "Certificate of Commendation" (2003, 2005).
• International assignments: Rule-of-Law Program in the Republic of Georgia (2018); Rule-of-Law Program in Cuba (2013).
• Education: JD George Washington University Law School (1988); BSCE Duke University School of Engineering (1985) — an engineering degree, not a humanities one.

Judge / Army JAG

Judge Danielle C. Mercurio

• Appointed: April 19, 2021 — 28 days after Guertin's InfiniSet patent provisional filing (March 19, 2021).
• Prior federal service: United States Army-National Guard, Judge Advocate, 2011–2020. Army Commendation Medal for excellence in trial defense counsel, 474 Field Trial Defense Team. Meritorious Service Medal as Brigade Judge Advocate for the 84th Troop Command.
• Education: J.A. Cert 2014, University of Virginia — The Judge Advocate General Legal Center and School (the Army JAG School).
• On this case: 7 docket events on 27-CR-23-1886. Co-signed the January 17, 2024 Finding of Incompetency at 08:27 CST on January 16, 2024 — one day before the document's filing date (cross-ref /judicial/#actors).

Newly Reassigned / State Dept. Rule-of-Law

Judge Paul R. Scoggin

• Appointed: January 2, 2015 by Governor Mark Dayton. Re-elected 2016, 2022.
• Prior federal service: Assistant Hennepin County Attorney, 1984–2014 (30 years as prosecutor).
• International assignments:
  • Consulting Expert, U.S. Department of State Rule of Law Mission to the West Bank, 2011–2017.
  • Consulting Expert, U.S. Department of State Rule of Law Mission to Jordan, 2011–2012.
  • Consulting Expert, Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) Rule of Law Mission to North Macedonia, 2010–2011.
  • International Prosecutor, European Union External Action, 2009–2010.
• Current role: Lead Judge, Felony Crimes Against Person Division.

Assistant Chief Judge / DOJ Civil Rights Div.

Assistant Chief Judge Mark J. Kappelhoff

• Appointed: July 1, 2016 by Governor Mark Dayton.
• Prior federal service:
  • Special Counsel, Civil Rights Division, Office of the Assistant Attorney General, U.S. Department of Justice.
  • Deputy Assistant Attorney General, Civil Rights Division, U.S. Department of Justice.
  • Chief, Criminal Section, Civil Rights Division, U.S. Department of Justice.
  • Special Assistant United States Attorney, U.S. Attorney's Office, District of Minnesota.
• Awards: Presidential Rank Award, Senior Executive Service, Meritorious Executive (2010). Attorney General's Award for Exceptional Service (2015); Attorney General's John Marshall Award (2010); Attorney General's Award for Distinguished Service (2003).
• Current role: Assistant Chief Judge of the Fourth Judicial District. Criminal Division assignment February 2024 to present.

Four Consecutive References to Federal Service

The pattern is visible on its own. Four consecutive references to federal service, reproduced from the court's own publicly presented biographies:

• Air Force JAG.
• Army JAG.
• U.S. State Department Rule of Law Mission. (×3 missions; ×2 foreign countries + the West Bank)
• U.S. Department of Justice Civil Rights Division (three separate titles — Special Counsel, Deputy Assistant Attorney General, Chief of Criminal Section).

These are the biographies the Fourth Judicial District has chosen to publish about the individuals presiding over the case against the patent holder. They are not anonymous hires. They are not "former government lawyers in the generic sense." Three of the four served in specific federal branches that correspond — by name — to specific entities who conducted LinkedIn searches on Guertin's dormant profile. The fourth is the Assistant Chief Judge.

Who Searched Guertin's LinkedIn Profile While the Criminal Case Was Active?

• 99 of 99 LinkedIn notification emails passed cryptographic DKIM authentication — 100% verified. Zero forgery indicators.
• 597 total profile searches recorded across 35 months (Dec 26, 2020 — Nov 16, 2023).
• The LinkedIn profile was dormant. Never completed, never promoted, never actively used.

Entities that appear in the authenticated record, by federal / defense / intelligence category:

The Four Most Damning Temporal Alignments

Why the Searches Concentrate Here Specifically

US Patent 11,577,177 ("Motorized Rotatable Treadmill and System for Creating the Illusion of Movement") describes a system integrating a motorized treadmill within virtual environments. Guertin's court-filed Exhibit Q (National Defense & Investment Opportunities Report, filed February 28, 2025 into case 27-CR-23-1886) maps the patent's capabilities directly to documented U.S. defense investments:

Patent capabilities named in the court filing: soldier traversal of virtual terrain, VR/LED volume integration, digital twin creation via multi-angle photogrammetry, AI-driven environment generation, remote distributed training. Defense contractor partnerships named: Lockheed Martin or Northrop Grumman — VR training modules for F-35 pilots and ground troops. Dual-use commercialization path named: Anduril Industries for border security simulations and drone operator training.

Guertin's Patent Appears at the Top of Netflix's References Cited Section

Filing priority gap: 12 days. Guertin's provisional application: March 19, 2021. Netflix's application (Stephan Trojansky, Scanline VFX president): approximately March 31, 2021.

Core claim overlap: 7 of 7 functional categories.

Verifiable immediately: look up US 11,810,254 on Google Patents or USPTO Patent Public Search; examine the References Cited section. US 11,577,177 and "Guertin" is listed there. The USPTO formally received, accepted, and recorded Guertin's patent as prior art during the examination of Netflix's application. The Netflix patent was granted anyway, on November 7, 2023 — 24 days before Guertin's next consequential case event.

Netflix acquired Scanline VFX (Trojansky's company) in November 2021. In January 2023, Paul Debevec — who directs USC-ICT's Army-funded Vision and Graphics Lab — was named Chief Research Officer of Eyeline Studios (Netflix). Eyeline Studios was consolidated with Scanline VFX on October 15, 2025.

Four Independently Established Facts

Consider four independently established facts about State of Minnesota v. Matthew D. Guertin.

These facts do not require interpretation. They require arithmetic and basic logic. The reader is invited to arrive at the same conclusion the evidence compels — and to examine the verifiable public record underneath it, end-to-end.

Viewable + Downloadable

Forensic Reports

Judicial Biographies (captured November 18, 2025)

Each biography PDF, its .ots OpenTimestamps proof, the full supporting files .zip, and the zip's .ots proof — reproduced from mncourts.gov exactly as the court publishes them.

Full 4th District Roster (Nov 28, 2025)

90 names on the roster. 247 humans actually doing the work.

The Fourth Judicial District publishes a public list of 90 judges and referees. Its own filed court documents — every signature, every order, every officer attribution across the database — record 247 distinct human officers doing the work. 76 of the 90 published names match the records. 168 officers in the records have no published roster entry.

The largest single name in that 168-officer surplus is Referee George Borer.

• 1,085 docket-event attributions across 434 distinct cases.
• Roughly 30% of those events are competency-pipeline events: Found Incompetent, Finding of Incompetency and Order, Rule 20.01 evaluation orders.
• Borer presided over Matt Guertin's July 7, 2023 contested competency hearing. He signed the July 13, 2023 Finding of Incompetency and Order that started Guertin's three-year prosecution clock.
• Capture the Hennepin Fourth Judicial District public roster on November 28, 2025: George Borer is no longer listed. A year earlier he was. The 1,085 events are still there. He was removed from the roster, not from the record.

Among the 247 officers, seven share cases at a rate that is structural, not statistical.

Map every case in which two judicial officers both signed an order or attended a hearing, and connect the two officers with a line. The resulting graph contains 120 nodes and 1,441 connections. Inside that graph, seven officers form a fully connected sub-graph — every one of the seven paired with every other six. Zero exceptions. That is not a profession; that is a team.

Julia Dayton Klein · Danielle Mercurio · Michael Browne · Lisa Janzen · William Koch · Lori Skibbie · Carolina Lamas

The internal connection weight inside the ring is 4,263 shared cases. A matched comparator group of seven other Hennepin judges drawn from the same caseload tier carries an internal weight of 227. This group of seven shares cases roughly 19 times more often than a random group of seven officers from the same courthouse.

The pattern carries through to the corpus-wide top-10 case-sharing officer pairs. Every single one of those 10 pairs sits inside or attached to the ring. The Browne–Klein pair is #1 at 477 shared cases. Klein appears in 6 of the top 10. She is the hub.

Three roles. Not twelve divisions.

And they are not interchangeable. The seven, plus a small surrounding cohort, divide cleanly into three functional roles — not by formal court division, but by what they do on the docket:

The advisors defer. The signers finalize. The gatekeepers route the medical records that the next finding cites. The same nine names show up at every step.

One member of the ring signs more orders than anyone else — on cases he has never personally heard.

Michael Browne has cryptographically signed court orders on 125 separate cases. The court's hearing index records 601 hearings on those same 125 cases. Browne held zero of them.

• Mercurio held 251. Klein held 195. Borer held 146. Three referees held 592 of the 601; Browne held the other zero.
• Mercurio appears on 100% of the 125 cases. Klein on 96.8%. Borer on 78.4%. Under any independent-assignment model, the 100% Mercurio ceiling is statistically impossible.
• 80% of Browne's 177 career signatures fall in 2023 alone.
• Across his 125 cases, the mean gap between Mercurio's hearing and Browne's signature is −70.7 days. Plain English: Browne signs an order on a case roughly 70 days before the case is filed. The hearings precede the signature by about two months.
• On 31.2% of his 125 cases — 39 of them — Browne is a "ghost-signer": his name is on the cryptographic signature but absent from the docket-officer array. The signing officer is not the officer the court records as having handled the case.

Note on hearing tables. Browne's "zero hearings" figure comes from the court's source_hearings index. The parallel parents_hearings_previous table records ~130 Browne hearings out of 2,330 across the same 125 cases. Browne is the smallest hearing-presider in BOTH tables; the absolute-zero figure is specific to source_hearings.

What this group does is not adjudicate one case at a time. It batches.

Forty-three calendar slots in seventeen years carry 50 or more scheduled cases at one (judge, date, time) tuple. Four officers own all 43: Mercurio 16, Klein 16, Borer 10, Janzen 1. 42 of the 43 are stamped at exactly 13:30. Tuesday afternoon at 1:30 is what this looks like.

Two exhibits.

And the same pattern repeats across other clusters: Browne and Skibbie each signing the same defendant's seven Rule-20 orders on a single day three months apart; Caligiuri running a 5-orders-then-5-Found-Competent loop on another defendant; the same calendar geometry on different dates. Full list in the methodology archive.

The pattern was already running fourteen months before the statute that authorized it took effect.

Minnesota's competency-pipeline statute — Minn. Stat. §§ 611.42–611.48 — took effect on April 1, 2024 — its original July 1, 2023 effective date was scrapped by Laws 2023 ch. 52 before it ever arrived. It is the statutory framework that now governs how Hennepin County declares defendants incompetent to stand trial.

The pattern documented above — the ring, the calendar geometry, the batch days — was running months earlier.

• The change-point cluster in officer activity peaks in February through June 2023.
• May 2023 alone produced 132 judicial signatures across the corpus — 4.36× the January–April 2023 monthly baseline of about 30 sigs per month.
• May 2 alone produced 80 sigs in one day — the entire corpus's highest-signature day, documented in §04.
• July 1, 2023 — the statute's original, later-scrapped effective date — registers as a null event in top-20 officer monthly activity. No spike. No drop. No structural change.

A digital signature is supposed to lock the document. On 463 of these orders, the seal was broken.

When a judge applies a digital signature to a court order, the cryptographic seal locks the document. Any modification after that — one byte changed, one timestamp updated, one line inserted — breaks the seal. Cryptographically detectable. The signature no longer matches the document it was applied to.

Across the 77-cluster forensic decomposition of MCRO's most procedurally complex defendants, eight named judges have applied per-officer cryptographic signatures to 463 court orders. 100% of those 463 carry the edits-after-signature flag. Every single one was modified after it was signed.

The eight signers: Browne, Klein, Borer, Mercurio, Janzen, Caligiuri, Lamas, Koch. (Per-signer counts in the methodology archive.)

Pull the lens back to the entire 77-cluster set. 1,079 of 1,080 non-watermark per-officer signatures — 99.91% — carry the edits-after-signature flag.

The single exception is on Matt Guertin's docket. A Minnesota Court of Appeals order signed by Chief Judge Frisch on the July 8, 2025 mandamus denial in case A25-0882 is the only per-officer signature in the entire forensic record that was not modified after signing. It instead fails cryptographic validation outright.

And one signature is not even digital.

Former Hennepin Chief Judge Toddrick Barnette's handwritten approval signature image is byte-identical across 7 different Rule-20.01 orders for 7 different defendants. The handwritten signature on Barnette's orders across seven different cases is the same image, pixel for pixel. Copy-pasted.

• 6 of the 7 orders were issued by Judge Lyonel Norris. The 7th was issued by Judge Janet Poston — ruling out a Norris-side workflow as the explanation. Two different issuing judges, the same handwritten approval image.
• 521 days separate the first and last of these orders.
• Guertin's order is filing #6 in chronological order across the seven.

Guertin's docket sits inside this wall. Klein's signed orders against him — including the January 17, 2024 Finding of Incompetency, signed at 09:22 the day before the document was filed — are inside the 1,079 modified-after-signature signatures.

What is countable about this group is not just what they do. It is who replaces whom — and who quietly leaves the roster.

Borer's roster removal.

George Borer presided over Matt Guertin's July 7, 2023 contested competency hearing. He signed the July 13, 2023 Finding of Incompetency that started Guertin's three-year prosecution clock. He signed 47 incompetency orders in a single day on May 30, 2023.

Capture the Hennepin Fourth Judicial District public roster on November 28, 2025: George Borer is no longer listed. A year earlier he was. The 1,085 events remain. The May 30 batch remains. The presiding role on Guertin's hearing remains.

Removed from the roster. Not from the record.

Hudleston as administrative buffer.

Sarah Hudleston is a rare visitor to the forensic dataset. 16 events across 4 clusters in the entire 77-cluster set. 8 of those 16 — half of her entire footprint in the dataset — land on Matt Guertin alone, in a four-month window from January 31 to May 30, 2025.

Four of those 8 events are on a single date — April 29, 2025. On that day Hudleston signed a 4th Rule-20 evaluation order, a Forensic Navigator appointment, a hearing-event entry, and a future-judicial-assignment notice on Guertin's case. The 4th Rule-20 order reversed Judge Koch's April 3 finding that Guertin was competent to proceed. 26 days from "competent" to "ordering a fresh evaluation."

Three of those four April 29 orders carry no recoverable cryptographic signer at all. Only the MCRO Watermark and an administrative-scan timestamp dated May 3 — four days after the orders were filed. The fourth event has no PDF attached. The reversal is documented; the cryptographic accountability is not.

Janzen exits. Koch enters.

Lisa Janzen went from 1,600 events in 2022 to 103 in 2023 — a 94% drop, exactly inside the frozen window. William Koch went from 66 events in 2022 to 130 in 2023 to 408 in 2024 to 647 in 2025 (the last two years carry the frozen-window flag — only Guertin's case has been refreshed since April 2024).

Every other pair of officers in the top-10 moves together — when one's caseload goes up, so does the other's. Carruthers and Koch are the one pair that moves opposite. When Carruthers' volume rises, Koch's falls. Pearson r = −0.5245 over 72 monthly observations, the rank-1 most-negative correlation among the top-10 officers.

The ring balances itself.

Quam, present in name.

Judge Jay Quam's name has been on Guertin's case since January 2023. Across 25 months on the docket, Quam has 3 events on the case — all Notice of Hearing clerical entries. Zero Orders. Zero Findings. Zero rulings.

In 3 of his 5 highest-volume forensic clusters — Youssuf, Johnson, Taylor — Quam is a principal decision-maker by event count. On Guertin he is not. He is the name above the work the others do.

This is not a court system with anomalies.

The bench you can see is not the bench that signs.

247 humans do the work. 90 names get published. 168 are doing the unpublished part.

Seven of the 247 form a connected group denser than any matched comparator by a factor of nineteen — each of the seven paired with each of the other six, no exceptions. The same seven divide into three role-clusters: advisors who defer, signers who finalize, gatekeepers who route the medical records that anchor the next finding. Three jobs. The same nine names at every step.

The terminal approver of the pipeline has held zero of the 601 hearings on his 125 signed cases. He signs orders 70 days before the cases are filed. 80% of his career signatures fall in a single year.

The pipeline runs on a calendar. 42 of the 43 highest-volume slots in 17 years are stamped at exactly 13:30. Tuesday afternoon. The pipeline runs on batch days. 47 incompetency findings in one day from one referee. 117 cases in 90 minutes from one judge.

The pipeline ran for fourteen months before the statute that authorized it took effect.

Every per-officer signature in the forensic record has been edited after signing. 1,079 of 1,080. The lone exception fails cryptographic validation instead. One handwritten approval signature — across seven different defendants — is the same image, pixel for pixel.

The administrative buffer that overrode a competency finding 26 days later signed four reversal orders without producing recoverable cryptographic signatures. The judge of record on the most-watched case in the corpus has made zero substantive decisions on it across 25 months. The referee who started that case's prosecution clock — and who signed 47 incompetency orders in one day — has been removed from the roster. The 1,085 events remain.

This is not a court system with anomalies.

This is an apparatus that produces court-shaped output.

They counted on no one ever pulling the list and counting.