State v. Mendoza

999 N.W.2d 311

STATE of Iowa, Plaintiff-Appellee,

v.Juan Jose MENDOZA Jr., Defendant-Appellant.

No. 22-1811

Court of Appeals of Iowa.

Filed September 27, 2023

Appeal from the Iowa District Court for Scott County, Michael Motto, District Associate Judge.

Juan Mendoza Jr. appeals his convietion for assault causing bodily injury. AFFIRMED.

Martha J. Lucey, State Appellate Defender, and Theresa R. Wilson, Assistant Appellate Defender, for appellant.

Brenna Bird, Attorney General, and Timothy M. Hau, Assistant Attorney General, for appellee.

Considered by Ahlers, P.J., Badding, J., and Scott, S.J.^*

AHLERS, Presiding Judge.

The State filed a trial information charging Juan Mendoza Jr. with assault causing bodily injury. After arraignment, Mendoza filed a motion to dismiss the trial information. He claimed the trial information was not signed in the manner required by the Iowa Rules of Criminal Procedure and the Iowa Rules of Electronic Procedure. The district court denied his motion. Mendoza waived his right to a jury trial, stipulated to a trial on the minutes, and was found guilty. He appeals. He contends the district court erred in not granting his motion to dismiss.

I. Standards of Review

[1–3] We review a ruling on a motion to dismiss a trial information for correction of errors at law. State v. Middlekauff, 974 N.W.2d 781, 790 (Iowa 2022). We also review a ruling interpreting and applying the rules of criminal procedure for correction of errors at law. State v. Hurlbut, 970 N.W.2d 259, 264 (Iowa 2022). Finally, we review a ruling interpreting court rules such as the rules of electronic procedure for correction of errors at law. In re Matthew Brandon Waltman Irrevocable Tr., No. 18-1750, 2020 WL 822027, at *2 (Iowa Ct. App. Feb. 19, 2020).

II. The Issue

This appeal arises because the trial information was signed as follows:

A TRUE INFORMATION

/s/ __________

Name Surname

Assistant County Attorney

1 Address St.

City, Iowa 11111

(111) 111-1111

Name@emailaddress.com

Mendoza contends the signature on the trial information had to be verified. Since it wasn’t, Mendoza argues there is a defect in the filing of the trial information and the trial information must be dismissed as a result.

III. Analysis

The State counters Mendoza’s argument with three of its own: (1) the motion to dismiss was untimely; (2) the signature on the trial information did not need to be verified and met the electronic-filing-rule requirements for a signature; and (3) even if the signature was defective, Mendoza suffered no prejudice so his motion to dismiss was properly denied. We will address each argument in turn.

A. Timeliness

Mendoza filed his motion to dismiss forty-four days after the trial information was filed, which was sixteen days after the filing of his written arraignment. Mendoza contends the motion is timely because it was filed within forty days of arraignment. See Iowa R. Crim. P. 2.11(2)(b)¹ (permit- ting pretrial motions raising "objections based on defects in the indictment or information"), (4) (requiring pretrial motions filed pursuant to rule 2.11(2) to be filed within forty days of arraignment). The State counters, as it did to the district court, by pointing to our electronic filing rules that require objections based on disputed authenticity or validity of any signature on an electronically filed document to be filed within thirty days "after the attorney or party knew or should have known the signature was not authentic or valid." See Iowa R. Elec. P. 16.305(7).

[4] We begin our discussion of this issue by noting that the district court did not address the State’s timeliness objection to Mendoza’s motion to dismiss. Even though the district court did not address the timeliness issue, since the State raised it below, we can consider it as an alternative basis for affirming the district court. See Hawkeye Foodservice Distrib., Inc. v. Iowa Educators Corp., 812 N.W.2d 600, 609 (Iowa 2012) ("It is established that a successful party in the district court may, without appealing, save the judgment … based on grounds urged in the district court but not included in that court’s ruling." (ellipsis in original) (quoting Interstate Power Co. v. Ins. Co. of N. Am., 603 N.W.2d 751, 756 (Iowa 1999))).

[5, 6] We find the State has the better of the arguments on timeliness. As noted, Iowa Rule of Criminal Procedure 2.11(4) requires a pretrial motion objecting to defects in the trial information to be filed within forty days of arraignment, while Iowa Rule of Electronic Procedure 16.305(7) requires a challenge to an electronic signature to be filed within thirty days after the party knew or should have known of a defect.² Mendoza contends that since these rules conflict, rule 2.11(4) should control because it is more specific. He relies on the familiar canon of construction that, where there is a conflict between specific and general statutes, the provisions of the specific statute control. See, e.g., MidWestOne Bank v. Heartland Co-op, 941 N.W.2d 876, 883 (Iowa 2020). Mendoza asserts that rule 16.305(7) is general, as it applies to any electronic signature on any document, whereas rules 2.11(2)(b) and 2.11(4) are specific because they apply only to challenges to a trial information. While we agree with Mendoza that the specific-trumps-the-general rule may apply, we disagree with his assessment of which rule is specific. The rules in conflict are rules 16.305(7) and 2.11(4), not rule 2.11(2)(b). Rule 2.11(4) deals with all motions under rule 2.11(2), not just to objections based on defects in a trial information. There is nothing specific about it. On the other hand, rule of electronic procedure 16.305(7) deals specifically with objections to signatures. To the extent there is a conflict between the rules as to which applies, we find rule of electronic procedure 16.305(7) to be more specific than rule of criminal procedure 2.11(4), so the deadline set by rule 16.305(7) controls. See id.

[7] More importantly, the electronic filing rules directly address this issue. Iowa Rule of Electronic Procedure 16.103 states that in electronically filed cases such as this one, the rules of electronic procedure control when they are inconsistent with other Iowa court rules. Therefore, in this contest between rule 2.11(4) and rule 16.305(7), rule 16.305(7) wins and its thirty-day deadline applies. As Mendoza failed to file his objection disputing the authenticity or validity of the prosecutor’s signature within thirty days of when he became aware of the claimed defect, he waived his objection. We affirm the district court’s denial of Mendoza’s motion to dismiss because the motion was untimely.

B. Sufficiency of the Signature

Even though the untimeliness of Mendoza’s motion is dispositive, we also address his other claims. Mendoza claims that the prosecutor’s electronic signature was invalid because it did not meet the verification requirements of Iowa Rules of Electronic Procedure 16.305(3) and 16.705. Rule 16.305(3) states that any document requiring a signature with verification "must be either signed by the subscriber nonelectronically and scanned for electronic filing or signed by the subscriber with a digitized signature." Similarly, rule 16.705 states that "[a]ny document requiring a signature to be made under oath or affirmation or with verification may be signed either nonelectronically and scanned into EDMS³ or may be signed with a digitized signature." The electronic filing rules define "digitized signature" as "an electronically applied, accurate, and unaltered image of a person’s handwritten signature" and a "nonelectronic signature" as "a handwritten signature applied to an original document that is then scanned and electronically filed." Iowa R. Elec. P. 16.201(35)(a)(l), (3).

[8] The parties agree the prosecutor’s signature here did not meet the requirements for a "digitized signature" or "nonelectronic signature." But the rules require a "digitized signature" or "nonelectronic signature" only if the trial information was required to bear a verified signature. See Iowa Rs. Elec. P. 16.305(3), .705. This is where Mendoza’s argument runs into a fatal roadblock—his argument is based on the faulty premise that our rules of criminal procedure require a verified signature. But Mendoza’s premise is not based on anything in our rules of criminal procedure. Instead, it is based on phrasing from our court’s decision in State v. Fiems that Mendoza takes out of context. No. 18-2241, 2020 WL 1879700, at *2 (Iowa Ct. App. Apr. 15, 2020). In Fiems, the defendant claimed the prosecutor engaged in misconduct through "prejudicial theatrics" by reading the entire trial information, including the sentence "this is a true information." Id. In rejecting this argument, our court noted that "[t]he statement ‘this is a true information’ is not a personal opinion regarding the guilt of the accused, it is a verification the State accuses the person of the described offense and is a required part of the trial information." Id. Mendoza seizes upon our court’s use of the word "verification," takes it out of context, and asserts it is a proclamation that a prosecutor’s signature on a trial information must be "verified."

Mendoza’s interpretation of Fiems is off base. Many words in the English language have multiple meanings and may be terms of art in a certain field depending on how they are used. Verify is one of those words. See Verify, Merriam-Webster.com, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/verify (last visited Sep. 6, 2023) (defining verify to mean "to establish the truth, accuracy, or reality of" or "to confirm or substantiate in law by oath"). There is nothing about our court’s use of the word "verification" in Fiems that suggests the term was used as a legal term imposing a requirement of being under oath. Further, Fiems did not address any signature-requirement issue regarding a trial information or interpret our rules of criminal procedure as it...