The Iowa Supreme Court has issued its latest round of opinions here.



One particular case I found interesting was State v. Morris.



The Facts

"On October 6, 2001, at 4:30 a.m., Brian Gonzales started the engine on his truck parked on the street in front of his home. He intended to let it warm up before driving to work. Gonzales reentered his home leaving the engine running. Shortly thereafter, he heard a “revving” of the truck’s engine, looked outside, and saw someone driving his truck away. Gonzales called Waterloo police and reported the taking of the vehicle. Officer Aaron McClelland arrived at the scene and took the necessary information from Gonzales, including a description of the truck. The officer then put out an “attempt to locate” call to Waterloo patrol officers for the location of a brown Ford Ranger pickup truck. Approximately thirty minutes later, McClelland came upon the missing truck about five miles from Gonzales’s residence. The truck was being driven in the opposite direction from that of the officer’s vehicle. McClelland turned his police vehicle around and gave pursuit. The person driving Gonzales’s truck stopped the vehicle, got out, and fled on foot toward nearby houses. Officer McClelland radioed for backup and a K-9 unit responded. One of the dogs alerted police to the presence of a person hiding on a porch of a house. McClelland identified this person as the man who had fled from the truck. That person was ultimately determined to be defendant, Willis Elbert Morris."



The Ruling:

"Although apprehension of the suspect within a short time of the taking of the vehicle does not defeat the possibility that there was an intent to permanently deprive the owner of the property at the time of the taking, it is a circumstance that severely limits the circumstantial evidence from which that intent can be inferred. The State urges that the circumstances under which the defendant abandoned the vehicle, i.e., stopping it and running away, are indicative of the requisite intent. We disagree. Abandoning the vehicle and fleeing upon observing the presence of police was an act that would ordinarily assure that the truck would be returned to its owner. We affirm the decision of the court of appeals holding that the evidence was insufficient to support a conviction for second-degree theft." They sent it back to the lower court for sentencing on the lesser-included offense of operating a motor vehicle without the owner’s consent in violation of Iowa Code section 714.7.



Say again? He took the truck, drove off, ran from the police, and hid on a porch, and a jury felt that under the totality of the circumstances there was sufficient evidence to infer he meant to steal it. This was an issue of fact for the jury, not a legal issue. The jury spoke. Yes, they inferred his intent from the circumstances - that's the jury's job. The State will never be able to furnish direct proof of what a defendant was thinking until we 1) invent a fool-proof lie detector test and 2) decide to chuck the Constitution in favor of a law requiring people to take such a test.



The majority focused largely on an earlier auto theft guilty plea case called State v. Schminkey, 597 N.W.2d 785 (Iowa 1999). Those facts: At 7 p.m. Schminkey accompanied a friend to a party where he consumed several beers. He eventually left that party and went to a bar where he drank more alcohol. Later in the evening, at approximately 10:45 p.m., Schminkey was seen driving a pickup from Blairstown to Van Horne. Minutes later, he was involved in an accident, and then crashed the vehicle into a fence a block or two from the accident scene. The owner of the pickup had parked the vehicle in Blairstown and had not given Schminkey permission to drive it. Schminke used an "Alford Plea" (I'm not going to plead guilty but I am going to admit you have sufficient facts to find me guilty and agree to basically 'stand silent' while you find me guilty). The Court ruled that under the circumstances, there was not enough evidence for the Court to infer a factual basis for the intent to permanently deprive the owner of the vehicle.



I agree with the dissent that the circumstances of that case were different. In a guilty plea, it is up to the court to ensure there is a factual basis for each element of the crime that the defendant is pleading to as outlined in the trial information. It is not acting as a "finder of fact" because there is no trial and no presentation of evidence. It is therefore not allowed to infer or fill in the blanks, but must go by the facts as stipulated by the parties. The dissent quotes United States v. Tunning, 69 F.3d 107, 113 (6th Cir. 1995) to prove its point: "Although we agree that a rational fact finder could infer an intent to defraud from such evidence, in the context of a challenge to the factual basis supporting a guilty plea, we have previously rejected a request by the government to infer a “critical element” of the offense charged.



So while the Court can't make the inference in a guilty plea proceeding, a jury is supposed to use its common sense applied to the facts to come up with a decision as to the intent of the defendant. The defense was able to submit its claims that he was "just borrowing" the truck at trial, in a full and fair presentation of the evidence. Let the jury do its job.



Side note: while it wasn't discussed in the opinion, intoxication is generally a defense to intent - the argument being that one can be so drunk one is incapable of forming a specific intent to do something. I would therefore argue that the cases are even further apart than the dissent indicates: not only did the Schminkey trial court make an improper factual inference, it did it in the face of a potential intoxication defense; here there was no such intoxication evidence to blur the jury's finding of intent under the totality of the circumstances.