Tales from Highway 59

Some Minnesotans might remember the Yahtzee murders. In 2010, in the tiny western Minnesota town of Alberta, three siblings were charged with killing their mother because she supposedly wanted to play Yahtzee on Christmas Eve and they didn’t. What’s less well-known is the fact that the only one of the three defendants to avoid prison time was represented by Kent Marshall. “It was a bizarre case,” he says. “The other defense attorneys and I often said that much like the movie Fargo, if they had a woodchipper, they might’ve gotten by with it.”

The criminal defense attorney, based 30 miles north of Alberta in Barrett (pop. 366), has taken on his share of odd and noteworthy cases in his 46 years of solo practice. But most of his career has been spent providing quality defense for some 

of the least sympathetic clients a lawyer can find—a tricky proposition for a small-town lawyer.

“New clients sometimes know me, the families of their victims sometimes know me,” says Marshall. “When the county attorney and I are choosing a jury, it’s almost certain that somebody in the panel will know at least one of us. That’s going to happen when you work in a county with about 4,500 people.”

Over the years, Marshall has been involved in more than two dozen murder trials and hundreds of felony cases, so, on occasion, his work has been known to take him beyond the confines of Grant County. He has argued in both state and federal courts in Minnesota, North Dakota and South Dakota.

His path to a law career was forged by the turbulent 1960s and a desire to right wrongs—along with an equally strong desire to use his mind instead of his back to make a living.

“I grew up picking rocks in the summer for the nearby farmers,” he says. “When it’s a hot June day and you’re out there picking up rocks, being a lawyer sounds pretty good.”

Once he had his law degree from Hamline University’s old Midwestern School of Law—as part of the first class that was allowed to take the Bar exam without having to petition in beforehand—Marshall found himself instantly at work. Almost as soon as he passed the Bar, a veteran lawyer named Bruce Sherwood came calling; Sherwood had two jury trials scheduled for the following Monday, and asked Marshall to take one.

Then a judge appointed Marshall to represent a defendant on sex offense charges. Not long after that, he took on a nearby client accused of killing his girlfriend. 

“Within my first 18 months of practice, I had three murder cases,” says Marshall. “I just never made it out of town.”

He would make it out of town soon enough. To cover various jurisdictions in a three-state area, Marshall estimates that he was putting between 45,000 and 60,000 miles on his car each year.

“I can’t tell you how many times I’ve driven all the way to St. Louis County—or to Grand Rapids, or Crookston—for a 10-minute hearing,” says Marshall, who has worked on cases in 75 of Minnesota’s 87 counties.

Trips to the Twin Cities resulted in some of Marshall’s most memorable cases, in part because they afforded him the opportunity to practice alongside some of the legends of the state’s criminal defense bar.

“I had a case in St. Paul about 20 years ago where a family was indicted on 125 counts of various kinds of wire fraud and farm fraud,” Marshall says. 

“I enlisted the help of Joe Friedberg, Earl Gray, Peter Wold and John Brink. We tried that case against the federal government, which of course has unlimited resources. 

We got not-guilty verdicts on every count of the indictment.”

In Grant County in the 1980s, he repped a man accused of killing his girlfriend at a high school graduation party. After the case had been through the juvenile justice process and up to the state Supreme Court, where the defendant was certified to be tried as an adult, it took the jury only four hours to find him not guilty. Marshall had the late Joe Friedberg in his corner that time, too.

“That was memorable not just because of the result, but also because working with Joe was a real treat for a young lawyer,” he says. “I learned a lifetime’s worth of trial work in a couple of weeks.”

While Marshall has begun winding down his career, he still takes clients when they need his help. As of this spring, he was juggling three “shaken baby” cases, among others. 

“Late in his career, Yogi Berra was asked, ‘You only got into nine games last year. What do you hope for this year?’ And he said, ‘I hope to get into none,’” Marshall says. “That sounds pretty good. My wife Colleen and I have lots of grandchildren to visit and lots of places we want to travel to.”