Rhoades v. State

880 N.W.2d 431

Nick C. RHOADES, Appellant,

v.STATE of Iowa, Appellee.

No. 15–1169.

Supreme Court of Iowa.

April 15, 2016.

Dan Johnston, Des Moines, for appellant.

Thomas J. Miller, Attorney General, and John McCormally, Assistant Attorney General, for appellee.

APPEL, Justice.

In this case, we consider whether a defendant who has pled guilty to a criminal offense but later successfully challenged the validity of the plea may qualify as a “wrongfully imprisoned person” under Iowa Code section 663A.1 (2015).

I. Background Facts and Proceedings.

Nicholas Rhoades was HIV positive when he came in contact with A.P. on a social networking site. After exchanging messages, A.P invited Rhoades to his home. A.P. understood Rhoades to be HIV negative, in part because of Rhoades's online profile. Rhoades and A.P. engaged in consensual unprotected oral and protected anal sex at A.P.'s home. When A.P. learned that Rhoades was HIV positive, he contacted law enforcement. Rhoades was charged with criminal transmission of HIV in violation of Iowa Code section 709C.1 (2007).¹

Ultimately, Rhoades pled guilty to one count of criminal transmission of HIV. The district court sentenced Rhoades to a term in prison not to exceed twenty-five years with life parole and required Rhoades to be placed on the sex offender registry. Rhoades filed a motion to reconsider the sentence. The district court then suspended Rhoades's twenty-five-year sentence and placed Rhoades on probation for five years. Rhoades did not appeal.

About six months later, Rhoades filed an application for postconviction relief. Rhoades alleged that his trial counsel provided ineffective assistance by allowing Rhoades to plead guilty to a charge for which there was no factual basis. The district court denied relief, and the court of appeals affirmed. We granted further review. On further review, we reversed the judgment of the district court. See Rhoades v. State, 848 N.W.2d 22, 33 (Iowa 2014).

In that appeal, Rhoades claimed that his guilty plea was invalid because there was not substantial evidence to support the plea. Among other things, Rhoades stressed that at the time of his offense, his viral load was virtually undetectable. He argued that in light of the developments in medicine, there was insufficient factual evidence to support the guilty plea. The mere fact that he knew he had HIV, Rhoades argued, was not enough to provide a factual basis for the crime.

We first began by examining the elements of the offense. Id. at 26. One of the elements of criminal transmission of HIV was “intimate contact.” Iowa Code § 709C.1(1)(a ). The statute defined “intimate contact” as “the intentional exposure of the body of one person to a bodily fluid of another person in a manner that could result in the transmission of the human immunodeficiency virus.” Id. § 709C.2(b ).

We then examined the colloquy before the district court in accepting the guilty plea. Rhoades, 848 N.W.2d at 29. When the district court asked Rhoades whether he had engaged in “intimate contact” with another person, Rhoades responded “Yes sir.” Id.

We held that the admission that he had engaged in “intimate contact” with another was not a sufficient basis to support the guilty plea. Id. at 30. We concluded that the district court had used technical terms from the statute but that such conclusory terms were insufficient to establish that the defendant acknowledged facts consistent with the completion of the crime. Id. We further noted the minutes of testimony and the presentence investigation report did not provide a factual basis for the element of intimate contact. Id. at 31.

Finally, we considered whether judicial notice could be taken of the fact that a person with HIV could transmit the disease. Id. We concluded that we could not take judicial notice that an infected person could transmit HIV regardless of the viral load. Id. at 32. In light of advances in medicine, we concluded, on the record presented below, that there was insufficient evidence to show that Rhoades exchanged bodily fluids with A.P. or intentionally exposed A.P. to the disease. Id. at 32–33.

We remanded the case back to the district court. Id. at 33. Because it was possible the State may have been able to establish the necessary factual basis, however, we directed the district court to give the State an opportunity to do so. Id. If the State was unable to do so, we stated that the plea must be withdrawn and the State could proceed accordingly. Id. On remand, the State dismissed the charges against Rhoades.

Rhoades then filed an action under Iowa Code chapter 663A (2015), asserting that he was wrongfully imprisoned by the State and entitled to compensation. Under Iowa Code section 663A.1, a person may be a wrongfully imprisoned person and entitled to relief only if

[t]he individual did not plead guilty to the public offense charged, or to any lesser included offense, but was convicted by the court or by a jury of an offense classified as an aggravated misdemeanor or felony.

Id. § 663A.1(1)(b ).

The State filed a motion to dismiss, arguing that under the statute, Rhoades was not entitled to relief because he had pled guilty in a criminal case that provided the basis for the imprisonment. The district court granted the State's motion to dismiss.

II. Standard of Review.

This case involves a question of statutory interpretation. Such questions are reviewed for errors at law. State v. Hagen, 840 N.W.2d 140, 144 (Iowa 2013) ; Sanchez v. State, 692 N.W.2d 812, 816 (Iowa 2005).

III. Background to Wrongful Imprisonment Statutes.

A. Wrongful Convictions: From Case Studies to DNA. For many decades, the question of wrongful imprisonment has been a question of public debate. Beginning in 1932 with the publication of Edwin M. Borchard's Convicting the Innocent: Errors of Criminal Justice, there has been a steady stream of literature questioning the outcomes of our criminal justice system. Most of these early critiques involved detailed reconstruction and study of the records in individual cases and assessments of the accuracy of conclusions of guilt reflected in jury verdicts. See Adele Bernhard, When Justice Fails: Indemnification for Unjust Conviction, 6 U. Chi. L. Sch. Roundtable 73, 76–78 (1999) [hereinafter Bernhard, When Justice Fails ] (canvassing early wrongful conviction literature).

With the advent of DNA testing, however, the evidence of wrongful conviction moved from the anecdotal and conjectural to the empirical. The first conviction vacated based on DNA evidence occurred in 1989. Rob Warden, The Revolutionary Role of Journalism in Identifying and Rectifying Wrongful Convictions, 70 UMKC L. Rev. 803, 829 (2002). In 1996, the National Institute of Justice (NIJ) of the United States Department of Justice published a report identifying wrongful convictions for sexual assault and murder. Edward Connors et al., Convicted by Juries, Exonerated by Science: Case Studies in the Use of DNA Evidence to Establish Innocence After Trial (1996) [hereinafter NIJ Report], www.ncjrs.go v/pdffiles/dnaevid.pdf.

Unlike the prior case analysis, the NIJ Report employed DNA evidence to irrefutably prove the innocence of those wrongfully convicted. Walter F. Rowe, Forward to NIJ Report, at xv-xvi. Remarkably, in the seven years between 1989 and 1996 in sexual assault cases referred to the FBI, DNA results excluded the prime suspect about twenty percent of the time and only about sixty percent matched or included the primary suspect. Peter Neufeld & Barry C. Scheck, Forward to NIJ Report, at xxviii.² Other DNA-based studies revealed significant numbers of wrongful convictions. See Samuel R. Gross et al., Exoneration in the United States 1989 through 2003, 95 J. Crim. L. & Criminology 523, 524 (2005). The DNA-related developments stimulated law school affiliated organizations like the Innocence Project, affiliated with the Cardozo Law School, the Medill Justice Project, affiliated with Northwestern University, and the National Registry of Exonerations at the University of Michigan Law School to document and analyze wrongful convictions. What is the Innocence Project? How Did it Get Started?, Innocence Project, www.innocenc eproject.org/inpr/faqs/what-is-the-innocence-project-how-did-it-get-started (last visited Apr. 14, 2016); Medill Justice Project, About Us, www.medillju sticeproject.org/about-us-2 (last visited Apr. 14, 2016); The National Registry of Exonerations, Our Mission, Univ. of Mich. Law Sch., www. law.umich.edu/special/exoneration/Page/mission.aspx.³

The growing number of DNA-related exonerations provided the opportunity for retrospective study⁴ —specifically, the study of what went wrong in these cases where DNA evidence exonerated those that had been convicted of serious crimes. The retrospective study of these convictions showed that they were frequently based upon false confessions obtained from the defendant,⁵ eyewitness identification that proved to be unreliable,⁶ failure of the state to turn over exculpatory evidence,⁷ use of unreliable informant testimony,⁸ and ineffective assistance of counsel.⁹

B. Wrongful Convictions and Plea Bargaining. The vast majority of cases, however, are not decided after trial, but are resolved by plea bargaining.¹⁰ The United States Supreme Court has observed, “In today's criminal justice system ... the negotiation of a plea bargain, rather than the unfolding of a trial, is almost always the critical point for a defendant.” Missouri v. Frye, 566 U.S. ––––, ––––, 132 S.Ct. 1399, 1407, 182 L.Ed.2d 379, 390 (2012).

The unlikelihood of an innocent defendant pleading guilty in open court is an appealing assumption. Kevin C. McMunigal, Guilty Pleas, Brady Disclosure, and Wrongful Convictions, 57 Case W. Res. L. Rev. 651, 656 (2007) [hereinafter McMunigal, Guilty Pleas ]. The conventional wisdom was that the problem of innocents pleading guilty was exaggerated and the likelihood of persuading an innocent defendant to falsely confess...