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Jim Backstrom
 Every time Jim Backstrom opens the top drawer of his desk in the Dakota County attorney’s office in Hastings, Minnesota, he sees the photo of a pretty little girl who will be six years old forever.
“She’s a beautiful little girl,” Backstrom says, “and I feel very close to her.”
The photo is of Corrine Erstad of Backstrom’s hometown, Inver Grove Heights. In 1992 she was kidnapped, brutally raped and murdered. Despite lengthy searches, her body has not been found. Backstrom personally prosecuted the man who he believed was the perpetrator, but after the five-and-a-half month trial and six-and-a-half days of jury deliberation, the defendant was acquitted. Backstrom believes this was largely due to the fact that Minnesota law at that time didn’t permit full use of DNA evidence that would have been persuasive, plus the fact that Corrine’s body had not been found. Both factors, Backstrom believes, permitted the defense to press the “reasonable doubt” argument.
One comforting development for Backstrom is that a year later, and largely as the result of the verdict in the Erstad case, Minnesota’s legislature changed the law, permitting full use of DNA evidence in courts. Even so, Backstrom says, “I still have a deep sense of sadness over that case. I think about Corrine Erstad a lot and it motivates me to keep fighting hard to bring justice to other innocent victims of crime in cases that we deal with every day.”
Hardly the image of the win-at-any-cost DA portrayed so often in the media and on TV. And yet, as his fellow prosecutors across the nation know, James C. Backstrom is the typical prosecutor, seeking truth and justice, as well as always keeping in mind the interests of the victim.
Backstrom’s jurisdiction covers 571 square miles in what he describes as the “first ring suburbs” of the Twin Cities (Minneapolis and St. Paul) and one of the fastest growing counties in Minnesota and the Midwest. Although there is no core city in the jurisdiction, its 350,000 residents live largely in 11 cities ranging in population from 15,000 to 85,000, plus nine smaller rural cities and 13 townships, with corresponding police forces.
Backstrom oversees a staff of 90, including 34 assistant county attorneys. With a growing jurisdiction and his expanding responsibilities, Backstrom can’t personally prosecute as many cases as he once did, and he still manages do some courtroom work from time to time.
In fact, one of his greatest sources of pride is that in 1998 he argued a case before the highest court in the land, the U.S. Supreme Court, and won a reversal of a decision by the Minnesota Supreme Court. At issue was whether police actions in a drug case constituted an unreasonable search and whether the defendants had standing to challenge the search. In the case the police arrested defendants after observing them, through a window, bagging what appeared to be drugs. The Minnesota Supreme Court reversed the convictions on the grounds that the police violated the defendants’ expectations of privacy under the Fourth Amendment by peeking through the window. The U.S. Supreme Court, after Backstrom’s argument, disagreed and reinstated the convictions.
Jim Backstrom has served as an NDAA vice president and is one of its most active and longest-serving committee co-chairs. During the seven years that he has co-chaired the Juvenile Justice Advisory Committee, a period in which juvenile crimes of violence exploded throughout the nation, he has become a nationally recognized authority on juvenile crime, speaking and writing frequently on the subject and testifying before congressional committees.
His ability to handle many professional responsibilities, at the local, state and national level, and perform them all well, reflects the strong work ethic instilled in him by his hard-working family. His father was a fireman in Duluth and his mother worked as a sales clerk and bookkeeper in a grocery store. His sister Sue has taught in an elementary school for more than 30 years. He was an honor student throughout his collegiate career, graduating from the University of Minnesota at Duluth magna cum laude and with honors from the university’s William Mitchell College of Law in 1978, becoming the first member of his family to receive an advanced degree.
Backstrom has worked since his law school days in the office that he now heads. He started as a law clerk in 1977, was hired as an assistant county attorney in 1978, became head of the office’s civil division in 1982 and was appointed county attorney in 1987. Under his leadership, the Dakota County Attorney’s Office has received many state and national awards for its innovative crime prevention and crime-fighting programs.
Jim Backstrom is one of thousands of local prosecutors who love their job and can tell you precisely why.
“It’s a rare opportunity to be a prosecutor,” he says, “to have a direct impact on the quality of life in your community and state. It’s an honorable and noble profession, in which I’m proud to serve. We help people, be they innocent victims of crime or mothers in need of child support payments. This is what motivates me and keeps me as excited today about this job as I was at the moment I first took the oath of office as Dakota County attorney in 1987. We (prosecutors) are the only lawyers in America who come to work every day with the interests of justice in mind in every decision we make. We should be proud of that and we need to make sure that the public understands what we do.”
Jim Backstrom confesses that he was so shy as a boy that his Duluth East High School Class of 1971 voted him its shyest boy. This year when he attended the class’s 30th anniversary reunion, his classmates discovered that the title no longer applied. Jim isn’t shy any more.
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