personally waive the rights to testify at trial, to have the prosecution witnesses testify in defend other settings. One such case arose when a defendant charged with first-degree criminal sexual conduct stipulated to the element that he was more than 36 months older than the victim without waiving his right to a jury trial on that element. State v. Wright, 679 N.W.2d 186, 190 (Minn.App.2004), review denied (Minn. June 29, 2004). In Wright, we applied a harmless-error analysis to the district court’s failure to obtain appellant’s personal waiver. Id. at 191. In part, we reasoned that proving the age element to the jury would have had “a more prejudicial effect than- the stipulation” because appellant was significantly older than the victim. Id.; see also Hinton, 702 N.W.2d at 281-82 (<HOLDING>). Also, both Wright and Hinton involved
holding that stipulation of the appellants undisputed prior convictions was harmless error and reasoning that blakely v washington which does not require a jury determination of prior convictions provides implicit support for the conclusion that a harmless error analysis is appropriate recognizing that where the error involved defies analysis by harmless error standards or the data is insufficient to conduct a meaningful harmless error analysis then the error will not be proven harmless beyond a reasonable doubt holding blakely errors are subject to harmless error analysis holding that the trial courts error in not allowing defendant to testify on direct examination as to nature and circumstances of prior convictions was not harmless error where credibility of the defendant was critical to the deliberations of the jury holding that any error was harmless and thus not plain error