Pardoned Convict Serving as Sheriff

Bruce Dockendorf says he'll never forget that night in 1970 when he thought he was going to die.
Then 19, he was hitchhiking through central Minnesota when he was robbed by three teenagers who picked him up and said they had a gun.
"I was in Vietnam for four years and never got as scared as I was with those guys," said Dockendorf, 55, now a Minneapolis carpenter. "They said they were going to kill me."
He said he was amazed to learn that one of the men sentenced for that robbery 36 years ago is now the acting sheriff of Koochiching County.
Because of a 1983 pardon, John Mastin, 53, whose crimes as a young man landed him in the jail he now oversees, is not bound by a state law barring felons from becoming a law enforcement officer or a federal law prohibiting them from carrying a gun.
However, Mastin became a policeman several years before he was pardoned.
When Sheriff Duane Nelson resigned in December, the county board voted to have Mastin run the department as undersheriff until next fall's election.
And Mastin has talked about running for the job.
His lawyer says it's unfair to dredge up his past. But that past has become an issue in a federal sex-discrimination lawsuit brought by a sheriff's department employee.
"Nobody asked me if he should be pardoned," Dockendorf said. "I'm very surprised this guy was allowed to be in law enforcement."
Inmate, now boss
The suit was brought against Mastin, Nelson and the county in 2004 by Florence Hervey, the county's jail administrator.
Hired as a jailer-dispatcher in 1976, Hervey knew Mastin that year as an inmate, jailed for fighting with police officers.
He was convicted of obstructing arrest, a gross misdemeanor purged along with the robbery in the 1983 pardon by Gov. Rudy Perpich. The pardon cited Mastin's clean record since 1976 and his "good character and reputation."
In her suit, Hervey alleged that beginning in 2003, when Mastin became undersheriff, he worked with Nelson's blessing to undermine her authority. She is the only female administrator in a department that has never had a full-time female deputy. She said he created a hostile work environment and tried to make her quit.
She has a college degree, almost 30 years as a jailer and praise from state inspectors.
She says Mastin micromanaged the jail and retaliated when she objected, berating her performance and twice suspending her without pay.
"Describing [it] as a different management style is a thundering understatement. ... It was outrageous, humiliating, retaliating and discriminatory," her attorney, Celeste Culberth of St. Paul wrote in court papers.
Nelson and Mastin counter that Hervey was disciplined for misconduct and insubordination after she refused to recognize Mastin as her superior or help absorb state budget cuts, and went to outside agencies with her concerns.
"Her case amounts to 'I do not like how I am being supervised, and therefore I feel harassed,' " wrote their attorney, Eric Quiring of Minnetonka.
Records of Mastin's criminal history are hard to come by. He disclosed in a deposition that he became a Golden Gloves boxer at Thistledew, a camp for juvenile offenders in northern Minnesota.
In 1971, he was sentenced to the state's now-defunct Youth Conservation Commission (YCC) for robbing hitchhiker Dockendorf in Pine County. While in the state prison at St. Cloud, he earned a high-school equivalency diploma.
Documents his attorney provided to the Star Tribune show that in 1972 the YCC discharged him from custody, saying it was impressed with his conduct. It said his special discharge would nullify his conviction, seal his record and have "the same effect as a pardon in that it generally relieves you of the legal disabilities" of a conviction.
However, three years later the Eighth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals held that such discharges didn't restore gun-possession rights, and it instructed the YCC to inform its discharged felons of that.
Later, Mastin became a police officer, first in Big Falls, Minn., then South International Falls. Koochiching County hired him as a deputy in 1980. That year, soon after the Minnesota Board of Peace Officer Standards and Training began licensing officers, Mastin reported to the board that he'd never been convicted of a felony.
One of his attorneys, Ann Goering of Minneapolis, said the special discharge made his claim legitimate, a view shared by the licensing board's standards coordinator, A. Paul Monteen, who said it was unlikely the board would investigate whether Mastin illegally carried a gun before receiving the pardon, in part because it was so long ago. The pardon relieved him of having to disclose his conviction and restored his right to possess a gun.
The board's executive director, Neil Melton, said he knows of no other pardoned felons among more than 10,000 officers licensed by the state.
Embarrassing incidents
Hervey's suit says her treatment was unfair when her alleged misconduct is compared with conduct by Mastin that went undisciplined.
By his own admission, Mastin or the department had to pay a legal settlement in the 1980s to a man whom Mastin arrested as a joke. He also admits that while building a case to discipline Hervey, he gave a transcript of a tense conversation they had to his stepson. The stepson, Richard Mastin, is an International Falls police officer who also works for the sheriff's office part time.
The disclosure of personnel data, which may have violated state law, was discovered when the younger Mastin rolled his pickup while off duty. The next day, at the rollover scene, officers recovered his department pistol and the transcript.
Richard Mastin, who pleaded guilty to driving while intoxicated, was suspended without pay for three days. During the suspension, John Mastin arranged for his stepson to work a shift for the county.
In contrast, Nelson and Mastin suspended Hervey for 15 days last summer without pay.
The defendants have asked a federal judge to throw out her suit.