09/21/2026
Two changes to the Minnesota criminal history score took effect August 1.
Between them they will move more sentences than any severity ranking did.
The felony decay period went from fifteen years to ten. Misdemeanor and gross misdemeanor decay went to seven. And juvenile adjudications came out of the criminal history score entirely.
Think about who that reaches. Not the person with a recent record - their score is unchanged. It reaches the person whose record is old, and the person whose record is mostly something that happened before they were eighteen. Those are two of the groups most likely to be sitting at a presumptive commit on a score built out of history that no longer counts.
The changes govern offenses committed on or after August 1, so the date of offense controls, not the date of sentencing. That distinction is going to matter in every case straddling the summer.
If you have a client whose score was driven by juvenile adjudications or by convictions in their second decade of decay, recompute it. I would not assume the presentence investigation caught this in the first months after a change this structural.
