Minnesota state senator pleads not guilty to burglarizing stepmother’s home

A DFL state senator charged with burglarizing her stepmothers home has pleaded not guilty.

Senator Nicole Mitchell (Woodbury) was arrested and charged back in April after police found her in the basement of her stepmother's Detroit Lakes, Minnesota home. She claimed that she was retrieving items that belonged to her late father, including his ashes, claiming she was there because her stepmother refused to give her the items.

Mitchell has faced mounting calls to resign since the incident which happened during the legislative session. Those calls for resignation included Governor Tim Walz and Minnesota DFL Chair Ken Martin .

Mitchell is asking for both a settlement conference and jury trial as part of her not guilty plea.

The two sides also agreed that prosecutors won’t be able to argue that Mitchell stole a laptop computer that police seized when they arrested her. Ownership of the laptop had been in dispute. The agreement says that prosecutors can, however, use evidence from the laptop if the case goes to trial.

Mitchell’s arrest roiled the 2024 legislative session, which came to an acrimonious end, and ethics proceedings against her remain on hold pending developments in her criminal case. She denied stealing and rejected Republican calls for her resignation.

Her status posed a dilemma for her fellow Democrats because they held only a one-seat majority in the Senate, so they needed her vote to pass anything that lacked bipartisan support. They excluded her from caucus meetings and took her off her committees but colleagues did not publicly ask her to step down.

Mitchell was dressed all in black and wearing a black hat when she was arrested, the complaint said, and it quoted her as saying, “I know I did something bad.”

Her attorney has said that her dispute with her stepmother arose out of a “fractured relationship” that was aggravated by age-related issues.

Mitchell’s father died in March 2023 at the age of 72, according to his obituary. He had been married to Mitchell’s stepmother for 40 years, it said.

The Associated Press contributed to this story.