More than three decades after an Iowa appeals court overturned a sexual abuse verdict because of doubts about the child witnesses, a new roster of judges has gone back to clean up a loose end.
The Iowa Court of Appeals on Wednesday, Oct. 29 upheld the conviction of Daniel Lang, a Scott County man found guilty of sexually abusing a child under the age of 10 over multiple years. In doing so, the court explicitly overruled the 1993 case State v. Smith, involving another accused sex abuser, which has fallen into disfavor in subsequent decades.
“Smith has been routinely criticized by our court and the supreme court; it has never been followed; and its specter haunts our case law, perpetuating myths or false beliefs about the dynamics and law surrounding sexual abuse,” Judge Tyler Buller wrote for the court. “We take this opportunity to overrule Smith and exorcise the decision from our precedent.”
Defense attorneys frequently have cited the 1993 Smith ruling, although as Buller notes, such arguments have rarely been successful. While the ruling will not likely change the outcome of future cases, it formally establishes the prior case as invalid law and closes the door for future defendants making similar arguments.
What was the Smith decision?
The 1993 case involved Allen Smith, a Palo Alto County man convicted of sexually abusing several minor children. On appeal, the court reversed the conviction and ordered the case dismissed, finding that the children’s testimony was “self-contradictory, lacks experiential detail, and describes scenes … that border on the surreal” and that there was “insufficient credible evidence” to sustain the guilty verdict.
Overturning Smith has been a longtime goal for Buller, who prior to joining the bench wrote a law review article in 2017 calling for the case to be “formally disavowed.”
As Buller noted in the court’s decision, he wasn’t the case’s only critic. The ruling lists at least three Iowa Supreme Court decisions and a laundry list of opinions from the intermediate Court of Appeals that have issue with the Smith case, although never formally overruling it.
Subsequent courts have criticized the Smith opinion for applying the wrong standard of review to substitute the judges’ view of the children’s credibility for that of juries. Judges also have criticized Smith for suggesting that sexual assault victims’ testimony must be corroborated to be believed or unreasonably expecting child abuse victims will have “perfect memory” of what happened to them.
Court: 1993 case ‘wrong when it was decided, wrong now’
In the Oct. 29 ruling, which saw the full nine-judge court weigh in, Buller said modern research shows it is common for children to have conflicting or contradictory recollections of and feelings about their abuse.
“We disapprove of Smith and any of its progeny that embrace myths or stereotypes about sexual abuse dynamics,” Buller wrote.
The Smith decision also may have muddied the distinction between an appeal seeking a new trial, where appellate judges can consider witness credibility, and an appeal seeking permanent dismissal of a case, where an appellate court cannot, the court found.
“In short, Smith has long overstayed its welcome as controlling precedent,” Buller wrote. “It was wrong when it was decided, and it is wrong now. It has never been followed, and it is irreconcilable with our standards of review.”
With Smith overruled, the court considered the evidence against Lang and found his conviction supported by “substantial, if not overwhelming evidence,” rejecting his appeal.
Judge John Sandy wrote separately that he supported overturning Smith on narrower grounds than Buller, while Chief Judge Mary Tabor, joined by three other judges, wrote that she would have affirmed Lang’s conviction without “the extra step of overruling a three-decades-old outlier case.”
Smith’s defense attorney says appeals court oversteps
Lang’s attorney did not respond to a message seeking comment on the decision. But Des Moines lawyer Alfredo Parrish, who represented Smith in his 1993 appeal, told the Des Moines Register it was “disturbing” to see the court go out of its way to reverse its prior holding. Parrish noted, as Tabor did, that the Iowa Supreme Court has had multiple opportunities to overturn Smith and has declined to do so.
“I don’t believe that the Court of Appeals can reverse an opinion that the Supreme Court has addressed at some point and did not reverse,” he said. “… It may be outside of the mandate of the Court of Appeals to have reversed it, and there were other ways to decide the Lang case.”
Parrish also said overruling Smith doesn’t make sense in a case that doesn’t match the facts of that earlier decision.
“I agree with (Judge Tabor) that you didn’t have to reverse Smith to be able to decide the Lang decision because the facts are so different,” Parrish said. “(The Lang prosecutors) had a lot more supporting facts than the Smith case. … If you look at Smith, there was so much contradictory evidence that did not have any verification.”
On the other side of the courtroom, prosecutors are celebrating the decision, the Iowa County Attorneys Association said in a statement.
“Victims who have endured abuse deserve to be believed. Research has shown that the overwhelming majority of sexual abuse allegations (90%-98%) are true,” the association stated. “By formally overruling the Smith decision, the Court of Appeals reaffirmed that the jury is the sole finder of fact in a criminal trial. A jury who believes a victim should not be second-guessed or overruled.”
William Morris covers courts for the Des Moines Register. He can be contacted at wrmorris2@registermedia.com or 715-573-8166.
This article originally appeared on Des Moines Register: Iowa appeals court ‘exorcises’ 1993 decision that cast doubt on child sex abuse witnesses
Reporting by William Morris, Des Moines Register / Des Moines Register
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