The Minnesota Supreme Court on Wednesday overturned the conviction of a woman who exposed her breasts in a Rochester parking lot in 2021. Olmsted County prosecutors charged Eloisa R. Plancarte with a misdemeanor after Rochester police responded to a complaint about a woman walking around topless near a gas station. After a bench trial the following year, Judge Joseph Chase found Plancarte, 28, guilty of indecent exposure.

The Minnesota Court of Appeals upheld Plancarte’s conviction in 2024. In his verdict, Chase wrote that “Ms. Plancarte is an exhibitionist.” Chase, who has since retired from the bench, added that Plancarte “was not at a beach designated for nude bathing by people who enjoy that sort of thing.

She was not in a locker room or public lavatory which strangers might share in a state of undress. Ms. Plancarte was strolling across the parking lot of a gas station.” Turn Up Your Support MPR News helps you turn down the noise and build shared understanding. Turn up your support for this public resource and keep trusted journalism accessible to all.

But the Minnesota Supreme Court ruled unanimously that the term “lewdly” as used in the state’s indecent exposure statute “refers to conduct of a sexual nature,” and that Plancarte had not acted in a sexual manner. Writing for the majority, Justice Karl Procaccini, quoting Chase’s verdict, noted that the Olmsted County judge determined that Plancarte had not engaged “in any type of overt public sexual activity.” “[T]he State has not met its burden of proving that Plancarte’s exposure was lewd, because none of the evidence in the record suggests that her conduct was of a sexual nature,” Procaccini writes. Attorney Jess Braverman with the nonprofit group Gender Justice, who filed an amicus brief in support of Plancarte, said in an interview with MPR News on Wednesday that the court did not overturn Minnesota’s indecent exposure statute, but the justices did provide guidance to police and prosecutors about how to enforce it.

“The law still stands. Nothing about the law has really changed,” Braverman said. “It’s just that courts have clarified how to interpret it, and that clarification is basically that just saying a woman was outside, she exposed her breasts, that alone won’t cut it.

There has to be something else." In a concurring opinion joined by Procaccini, Justice Sarah Hennesy writes that criminalizing the exposure of female, but not male breasts “fails to recognize the more nuanced physical realities of human bodies.” Justice Theodora Gaïtas did not take part in the case. “Would a transgender man be prohibited from exposing his chest?” Hennesy writes.

“What about a transgender woman who has had top surgery? Where do the chests of intersex and nonbinary persons fit within this dichotomy? And how do we treat the exposed chest of a breast cancer survivor who has had a mastectomy?

Interpreting this statutory scheme as differentiating between male and female breasts is not sufficiently clear and definite to warn Minnesotans of what conduct is punishable.”