After having 18-year prison sentence commuted, Myon Burrell found guilty of drug and firearms charges

A Minneapolis man who spent 18 years behind bars on a murder charge before that sentence was commuted has been found guilty of drug and firearm charges.

38-year old Myon Burrell was found guilty on Tuesday of possession of a controlled substance and firearm by an ineligible person. Police say they found the items during a traffic stop for speeding last August in Robbinsdale.

A sentencing date has not been set.

Burrell was accused in the 2002 murder of 11-year-old Tyesha Edwards. His sentence was commuted in 2020 after questions were raised about his prosecution, but his pardon was denied, meaning that the felony conviction remained on his record.

“As in so many criminal prosecutions, things may not be as they first appear,” said his attorney, Paul Applebaum when he was charged last year. “I am particularly interested in the circumstances surrounding the initial traffic stop of Mr. Burrell.”

Burrell was arrested last September, and charged with one count of possession of a firearm by an ineligible person because of his prior conviction, and one count of possession of a controlled substance. The complaint said officers in suburban Robbinsdale who searched his SUV found a Glock 17 9 mm handgun with an extended magazine in the center console. The presumptive sentence on the gun charge is five years under state guidelines.

Burrell appeared before Judge Peter Cahill, who presided over the 2021 trial of former Minneapolis Officer Derek Chauvin for the murder of George Floyd in a case that forced a national reckoning on race and policing. Cahill sentenced Chauvin to 22 ½ years in prison.

Applebaum told reporters afterward that Burrell denies the allegations and would be able to make bail.

He would not concede claims that Burrell possessed or controlled a gun or had drugs in his car, “but if he did I guess it might not be a real stretch of the imagination” for Burrell to believe he needed a gun for protection.

“If he was culpable, if he was responsible for that gun, maybe people would understand that, when you are literally raised in a prison, that your thought process isn’t the same as the rest of ours,” Applebaum said.

“You have a young African American male, it’s a dangerous world out there, so it’s not inconceivable that if you lived in that environment that you might have a gun,” Applebaum said. “He wasn’t out there waiving the gun around, he wasn’t brandishing it, it was in a center console. I think it’s easy for people who live in relative safety and prosperity to judge people who maybe live in dangerous neighborhoods about how you should conduct yourself.”

The Dakota County Attorney’s Office prosecuted the case because the Hennepin County Attorney’s Office has a conflict of interest . Burrell was a paid staffer on County Attorney Mary Moriarty’s 2022 campaign, and she had worked for his release when she was a public defender.

The Associated Press contributed to this story.