Supervisors split in reimbursing Jefferson Sheriff
FAIRFIELD — The county will reimburse the legal expenses incurred by Jefferson Sheriff Bart Richmond, after the sheriff tangled with the Jefferson County Attorney's Office in court over his placement on a list of officers with questionable credibility.
The list is known as the Brady/Giglio list, named after two U.S. Supreme Court cases regarding information prosecutors must provide to defendants in criminal trials. If an officer is on the list, it means prosecutors would need to disclose information about what led to the placement to defense counsel if the officer is listed as a state's witness.
A district court judge in February found Richmond did not lie and thus his placement on the list was not warranted. After the ruling, Richmond asked the county to reimburse his legal fees to date. County Attorney Chauncey Moulding has filed a notice of appeal to the Iowa Supreme Court.
The issue first came to the board two weeks ago, but was tabled as supervisors looked into the legality of a potential reimbursement and to see if the county's insurer would cover the cost.
On Monday, Jefferson County Board of Supervisors Chairman Lee Dimmitt said the payment couldn't be covered under the county's insurance policy, but he did believe supervisors could approve the expenditure given Iowa Supreme Court opinions regarding public fund expenditures.
The Iowa Constitution requires expenditures to be for a public purpose, but Iowa's top court has held that purpose should be broadly defined. The longstanding precedent cited in multiple cases that finding an expenditure doesn't meet a public purpose must be so "clear and palpable as to be perceptible by every mind at first blush."
Dimmitt believed that precedent gave the supervisors room to legally reimburse Richmond's legal fees to date.
"I do believe in reading that, we have some flexibility regarding how we define it as a public purpose — or if we define it as a public purpose," Dimmitt said. "I would also add that if public funds were expended ... to remove the ability of the ... sheriff ... to perform all of the duties and responsibilities of the office, therego it would seem we could use public funds to restore the ability of the sheriff to perform all of the duties and responsibilities of the office. I don't think they are mutually exclusive of each other in those terms."
Supervisor Joe Ledger reiterated his calls for the "hours and dollars spent on this issue' be presented by the county attorney's office, and said he felt it was important to support Richmond.
"At this time, I'm in support of Richmond — we've got to get behind our county employees," Ledger said. "And this is just a place where if we don't support our county employees how many more is gonna wanna pull out because we don't have support."
The vote to approve the reimbursement was 2-1, with Supervisor Susie Drish opposed.
"There's no statute to authorize payment of these fees under current law," Drish said as she voted no.
Dimmitt acknowledged the county's budgetary challenges, and worried what would happen if legal expenses continued to climb. Supervisors have no authority to stop Moulding's appeal as long as he stays within his office's approved budget.
"Evidently, County Attorney Moulding feels strongly enough about this — whether I agree or disagree — to move forward with it," Dimmitt said. "I can't stop it. I wish that I could, but I can't."
Moulding was not at Monday's meeting.
The supervisors had pondered whether to make it a one-time reimbursement, or to cap the amount they will reimburse. The final motion was simply to approve the request before them now.
"This is a very difficult decision for me to make, anyway, because I can see both sides of the equation,' Dimmitt said. "I'm not willing, personally, to look at an unknown quantity. I can't do that. And the reason I can't do that is because we just talked this morning about not filling a position out at the roads department. ...
"What if it goes to $100,000, where am I supposed to get it? Out of [the sheriff's] budget? Does that cost a deputy his job or her job? Those are not hypotheticals here. If we were to have to find $100,000 somewhere, that is a difficult search to have."
Ledger said the taxpayers he's spoken to in recent weeks have indicated broad support for the reimbursement to Richmond.
"Over the past two weeks, I've been in contact with numerous county taxpayers who believe that we should support Sheriff Richmond," Ledger said. "Several comments were that this appears to be a personal attack on the Jefferson County Sheriff's Department."
The Iowa Supreme Court has not yet ruled on whether it will hear Moulding's appeal, and their timetable for making that decision is unknown. Moulding has previously challenged the constitutionality of the process Richmond used to challenge his placement on the Brady/Giglio list, which used a new law that took effect July 2024 to establish a judicial review process.
Moulding placed Richmond on the list in June 2024 for what he dubbed an obstruction into a use of force investigation. Judge Jeffrey Farrell said that while Richmond could have been more responsive, he was not dishonest and the conduct did not rise to the level necessary to warrant placement on the Brady/Giglio list.
"There is no evidence in this case that Richmond was dishonest or did not tell the truth," Farrell wrote. "The problem is that he was nonresponsive to Moulding's emails and hesitant to provide information to the Keokuk County Attorney during her investigation.
"The court has no doubt this entire case could have been easily avoided if Richmond had simply provided basic and professional responses to Moulding's emails."
Federal and state cases have generally "required a showing of deceit, deception, or dishonesty," Farrell wrote. Additionally, Farrell noted details about Richmond's conduct would not likely change a jury's decision if disclosed.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Atlantic
2 hours ago
- Atlantic
Birthright Citizenship Is a New World Ideal
The United States, Donald Trump says, 'is the only country in the world' that grants citizenship to babies born within its borders. He's wrong, of course. Tanzania, Pakistan, and France all grant some form of birthright citizenship. But birthright citizenship is ultimately an American ideal. That is, all of the Americas. Nearly every country in the Western Hemisphere grants citizenship to children born in its territory irrespective of the nationality of their parents. It's part of the promise of the New World, that the Western Hemisphere would be, as the American revolutionary Thomas Paine said of the United States, an 'asylum' for humanity. 'Open,' echoed George Washington, 'to receive not only the opulent & respectable' but the 'oppressed & Persecuted of all nations.' The children of those oppressed and persecuted would be citizens by right. The legal term for birthright citizenship is jus solis, or 'by right of soil'—in contrast to jus sanguinis, which assigns citizenship to children based on the national identity of one or both of their parents, an identity that could be defined by bloodline, race, or religion. Mexicans were the first to write jus solis into a constitution, in 1814, during their war of independence against Spain. In bright, unambiguous language, the rebels stated that 'all those born in La Mexica América are considered citizens.' By 'all,' they meant all. Having declared the abolition of both chattel slavery and Indigenous tribute and servitude, Mexican revolutionaries intended to make everyone, regardless of skin color, a member of the nation, but Spanish troops retook Mexico before this constitution could go fully into effect. The three-century-old Spanish empire was obsessed with blood—how it conveyed lineage and, in the Spanish view, confirmed virtue. Jus sanguinis had been the law of the land, and a good part of the empire's massive bureaucracy worked to keep track of ancestry, issuing certificates of purity certifying that no taint of Jewish, Muslim, Native American, or African blood flowed in the bearer's veins. Mexico was just one front in a hemisphere-wide war against Spanish rule, which began in 1810 and didn't end until 1826, when revolutionaries overran royalism's last bastion, the Pacific port city of Callao, Peru. With all of Spanish America (save Cuba and Puerto Rico) now free, the region's republican leaders were eager to leave Spain's blood medievalism behind, to create a modern legal system for the Americas. The foundation of that system was jus solis. In a revolutionary act of inclusion, the new nations of Spanish America adopted it universally, to apply to every free resident within a given national territory. In Spanish America, as in the United States, the politics of jus solis was tied to the politics of race and slavery. The historians Martha S. Jones and Kate Masur recently submitted an amicus brief to the U.S. Supreme Court to counter the Trump administration's efforts to abolish or curtail birthright citizenship. They note that free people of color—decades before the Civil War and ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868—regularly invoked a common-law version of jus solis: They were citizens of the United States because they'd been born in the United States. In 1848, African American activists in Pennsylvania published a pamphlet demanding constitutional protection, insisting that their 'certificates of Birth and Nativity' provide all the 'evidence' needed to confirm their citizenship. The nation's courts and laws, however, ensured that, in the United States, the bestowal of citizenship at birth remained predominantly a right enjoyed by white people. David W. Blight: Birthright citizenship is a sacred guarantee Spanish Americans applied jus solis more generously. In many of the region's new republics, to be born a citizen meant to be born free, as independence leaders moved quickly to repeal a doctrine— partus sequitur ventrem, Latin for 'the child follows the womb'—that defined children born to enslaved mothers as also enslaved. Widely applied during Spanish rule, the doctrine was still the law of the land in U.S. slave states when Chilean insurgents declared their independence in 1810 and passed, a year later, the world's first 'free womb' law. The idea of childbirth as an emancipatory act was Spanish America's unique contribution to the transatlantic antislavery movement. Argentina followed with a similar law in 1813, then Colombia in 1814, Venezuela and Peru in 1821, and Ecuador and Uruguay in 1825. Different nations ended slavery at different times, depending on local politics. Many countries—Chile and Mexico, for instance—did so soon after their break with Spain. Others, including Argentina, took longer. But with independence, the end of human bondage in Spanish America was clearly in sight. 'No one is born a slave,' Mexican abolitionists said. They are born citizens. Racism of course continued throughout the now-free Spanish America, as did a status and class hierarchy organized around racial identity. It was easier to defeat Spain's army than to dismantle the social structure its empire left behind. And jus solis had a dark side. Politicians used generous citizenship and naturalization laws to encourage European migration and campaign to 'whiten' the nation. Still, compared with the expansion of chattel slavery and hardening of racial apartheid then taking place in the United States, Spanish America was exceptional. Its founders were creating something entirely new in the world: a community of sovereign nation-states composed, at least legally, of equal, racially diverse citizens. James Madison noticed. The former president knew that his country couldn't go on subjugating people of color forever, be they, as he put it, 'the black race within our bosom' or the 'red on our border.' Writing in 1826, Madison thought it worth studying how 'the regions South of us,' especially Mexico and Peru, were incorporating emancipated slaves and Indigenous peoples into their newly constituted nations. Senator John C. Calhoun of South Carolina thought otherwise. Spanish America's 'fatal error' was 'placing the colored race on an equality with the white.' 'Ours is the Government of the white man,' he said in 1848, and it needed to remain so. Denying birthright citizenship to people of color was necessary to that vision. The United States eventually caught up with Latin America. In 1865, the Union Army defeated the Confederacy with the help of about 180,000 Black soldiers. Their rights could no longer be denied. The first sentence of the Fourteenth Amendment, ratified three years later, finally granted citizenship to free people of African descent: 'All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.' The middle clause of that sentence—'and subject to jurisdiction thereof'—is U.S. birthright citizenship's potential Achilles heel. It shouldn't be, because congressional debates from that time make clear what the drafters meant by that phrase. As the historian Eric Foner writes, Congress intended that clause to exclude not migrants but specifically Native Americans, who, the argument went, were ineligible for U.S. citizenship because of their subordination to tribal jurisdiction. (Congress would grant them citizenship in 1924.) Also excluded were foreign diplomats and soldiers, who were protected by their home country's jurisdictional immunity. (Most Spanish American nations likewise exempted foreign envoys from their jus solis clause, though none excluded Native Americans.) Migrants began arriving in the United States in massive numbers toward the end of the Civil War—mostly from Europe but also from Spanish America, the Caribbean, and Asia. Most came undocumented, without visas, passports, or formal permission to enter the country. Mexicans crossed the border at will, to work and to live. If the drafters of the Fourteenth Amendment wanted to exclude the children of these people from the benefit of birthright citizenship, they would have said so. But as Congress moved toward ratifying the amendment, whenever a nativist legislator proposed excluding this or that pariah people—the Chinese, say, or the Romani—from birthright citizenship, their colleagues pushed back with the broadest interpretation possible of jus soli, generous enough to cover, said California Senator John Conness, even 'the children born here of Mongolian parents.' There is no doubt that the amendment's authors understood that the offspring of foreign migrants in the United States were subject to the jurisdiction of the United States. But starting in the 1990s, activists and politicians seeking to restrict U.S. immigration policy interpreted the clause to apply to undocumented migrants. The first to formally do so was Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, a Democrat, who in 1993 introduced the Immigration Stabilization Act, arguing that a baby born to an undocumented mother who was a citizen of another country was, by definition, subject to that country's jurisdiction, not the United States'. Reid's proposal ignored the legal status of fathers and focused exclusively on the nationality of birth mothers, a curious resurrection of partus sequitur ventrem: The child follows the womb and is condemned to return to the country the mother fled. Reid's bill died in committee (and Reid later regretted his proposal, calling it the 'biggest mistake' he'd ever made). But it foreshadowed bad things to come. The Trump administration today is similarly asking the Supreme Court to interpret the clause to mean that children born of foreign nationals are not 'subject to the jurisdiction' of the United States, and therefore not eligible for citizenship. Most of Latin America holds fast to birthright citizenship today. 'All people born in Mexican territory,' Mexico's constitution states, 'regardless of their parent's nationality,' are Mexican, an identity that can 'never be revoked.' Colombia is one of the few nations that restricts jus solis, requiring at least one parent to be a nationalized Colombian. But with Venezuelans pouring into Colombia, fleeing their country's worsening situation, Bogotá—fearing the creation of a large class of gente apátrida ('stateless people') — has waived restrictions on jus solis. While the Trump administration seems to be set on making life miserable for Venezuelan refugees, Colombia has issued an estimated 27,000 birth certificates to babies born of Venezuelans in its territory. Chile likewise liberalized its jus solis requirements to support the arrival of hundreds of thousands of Haitian refugees, allowing many of their children to become Chilean citizens. The one woeful exception to the rule is the Dominican Republic. For decades, courts interpreted the constitution's exemption of people 'in transit' from jus solis as pertaining to diplomats. Then, in 2013, the country's Constitutional Court, stocked with right-wing nationalists and inflamed by rising anti-Haitian racism (the Dominican Republic shares the island of Hispaniola with Haiti), ruled that 'in transit' applied, retroactively to 1929, to Haitian migrant sugar-field workers. Overnight, 200,000 individuals born in the Dominican Republic to Haitian parents were stripped of their citizenship. At least 80,000 people were deported into Haiti; most of them had lived their whole lives in the Dominican Republic, and few spoke French or Creole. These deportees were born poor, in rural communities, in many cases at home, and have no official documentation whatsoever to mark their existence. If the United States follows the Dominican Republic and limits or does away with birthright citizenship, the result will likely be the kind of chaos seen in the Dominican Republic on an even greater scale. Trump's executive order is aimed at exempting from citizenship not just the children of undocumented parents but also the newborns of those in the United States legally, on work or student visas or awaiting their asylum hearings. The enforcement of such a restriction would require the re-creation of something like the blood-obsessed Spanish colonial bureaucracy, with officials demanding to see not just an individual's birth certificate to prove citizenship but at least one of their parent's birth certificates. The United States already has an underclass of millions of stateless workers. If their children and grandchildren were to be denied citizenship, that class would grow exponentially. Apart from the Dominican Republic, the nativist right in Latin America hasn't launched the kind of full-on assault on birthright citizenship we see in the United States. But the slurs niño ancla and bebê âncora —'anchor baby'—have entered the Spanish and Portuguese languages, mostly through social media, as far-right figures, including Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil and José Antonio Kast in Chile, whip up anger against refugees. Kast's anti-migrant party, Partido Republicano, is rising in the polls ahead of next year's presidential election, promising to tighten immigration laws and generally menacing Haitian migrants. In Argentina, Javier Milei has called for an end to the country's historic liberal immigration policies, in order to, he said, 'make Argentina great again.' The first batch of jus solis constitutions in Spanish America were drafted following a bloody, two-decade-long independence war, with fighting sprawling across the continent, scattering millions far from home. The men who led those wars were idealistic, but they also had pragmatic motives for embracing birthright citizenship: It was a way of re-rooting people, of settling a hemisphere in tumult.
The Hill
2 hours ago
- The Hill
Oklahoma to retry Richard Glossip for non-capital murder after Supreme Court threw out conviction
Oklahoma's top prosecutor said Monday that the state intends to retry Richard Glossip for murder but seek only a life sentence, after the Supreme Court threw out the death row inmate's capital conviction. Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond (R) supported Glossip's bid to overturn his conviction in a 1997 murder-for-hire plot, agreeing that the prisoner received an 'unfair and unreliable' trial. However, he maintained that he does not believe Glossip is innocent. The justices in February ruled that Glossip's due process rights were violated, tossing his conviction and ordering a new trial in a rare victory for a death row inmate at the high court, which typically does not intervene in such cases. 'While it was clear to me and to the U.S. Supreme Court that Mr. Glossip did not receive a fair trial, I have never proclaimed his innocence,' Drummond said in a statement on Monday. 'After the high court remanded the matter back to district court, my office thoroughly reviewed the merits of the case against Richard Glossip and concluded that sufficient evidence exists to secure a murder conviction. 'The same United States Constitution that guarantees our rights also ensures the rights of the accused,' he continued. 'Unlike past prosecutors who allowed a key witness to lie on the stand, my office will make sure Mr. Glossip receives a fair trial based on hard facts, solid evidence and truthful testimony.' Glossip was convicted for the 1997 killing of his former boss, Barry Van Treese. The motel owner was beaten to death by maintenance worker Justin Sneed but state prosecutors said Glossip ordered him to carry out the crime in a murder-for-hire scheme. Sneed evaded the death penalty by agreeing to plead guilty and testify against Glossip, earning a life sentence in prison instead. Glossip was found guilty and given a death sentence in 1998, but that conviction was overturned due to ineffective counsel on appeal. He was retried in 2004 and again convicted and sentenced to death. However, Glossip said the state denied him due process by withholding evidence from the defense and knowingly letting the jury hear false testimony from Sneed, a key witness. Drummond emerged as an unlikely ally to Glossip during his appeal. 'We conclude that the prosecution's failure to correct Sneed's trial testimony violated the Due Process Clause,' Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote for the majority. Sotomayor's majority opinion was joined by four other justices. Justice Amy Coney Barrett concurred in part and dissented in part. Justice Clarence Thomas dissented, which Justice Samuel Alito joined. And Justice Neil Gorsuch did not participate in the case, likely because he participated in one of Glossip's earlier appeals while serving on a lower court. Drummond said his office would not seek the death penalty against Glossip because Sneed, who admitted to killing Van Treese, is serving a life sentence without the possibility of parole. Glossip's next court date is set for June 17. 'The Van Treese family has endured grief, pain and frustration since the murder of their loved one, and my heart goes out to them,' Drummond said. 'The poor judgment and previous misconduct of past prosecutors have only compounded that pain and frustration. 'While I cannot go back 25 years and handle the case in the proper way that would have ensured true justice, I still have a duty to seek the justice that is available today,' he said.
Yahoo
3 hours ago
- Yahoo
3 Supreme Court Cases To Watch in June 2025
The clock is ticking for the U.S. Supreme Court. It's the second week of June and the justices always try to wrap up their term before the calendar hits July. As of this writing, there are still 28 cases pending. Which means that a ton of big decisions will be dropping in the next few weeks. So, what's headed our way? Here are three noteworthy cases that I'm on the lookout for. This case involves a Texas law requiring websites that contain "pornographic material" to verify that the site's users are at least 18 years old. The law's stated goal is to prevent minors from viewing porn. But as the Free Speech Coalition, an adult industry trade group, points out, there is no way to screen out minors online without also vetting the ages of adults, and Texas' intrusive age-verification process unavoidably—and unconstitutionally—burdens the free speech rights of those adults. The state's age-verification requirement "imposes a clear burden," the Free Speech Coalition told the Supreme Court, "forcing adult users to incur severe privacy and security risks—which the statute leaves largely unaddressed—before they can access constitutionally protected speech." The specific legal question here is about what level of judicial review the Texas law should face. According to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit, the age-verification law should be judged under "rational-basis review," which is the most deferential—meaning, it is the most pro-government—form of judicial review. It is no exaggeration to say that when the government encounters rational-basis review, the government stands an excellent chance of winning the case. However, cases involving fundamental rights such as freedom of speech are normally judged under a very different standard. That standard, known as "strict scrutiny," is the most searching form of judicial review. Under strict scrutiny, the government must, first, prove that its law serves a compelling government intent, and, second, prove that the law is the least restrictive means available of advancing that interest. If the government fails to satisfy either of those two prongs, the law is struck down. In other words, Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton asks whether the 5th Circuit got it wrong by deferring to the state under rational-basis review when the 5th Circuit should have instead given the state a far more rigorous exam under strict scrutiny. If that sounds like so much legalese, please believe me when I say that the stakes are high. If the First Amendment gets watered down from "strict scrutiny" to "rational-basis" in this case, then the First Amendment will be watered down in many future cases, too. A win for Texas means a loss for freedom of speech. The FBI raided Tina Martin's home in 2017. Still reeling from an exploding flash grenade, she found herself held at gunpoint, unable to reach or comfort her understandably terrified seven-year-old son, who was in another room. To make matters worse, it was a wrong-house raid. The feds were supposed to be at a different house on a different block looking for a different person. They wrecked Martin's home and traumatized her family because the officers never even bothered to make sure they were at the correct location. However, when Martin filed a civil suit seeking damages, the federal court said she was barred from filing suit under the terms of the Federal Tort Claims Act. So, the legal question now before the Supreme Court is whether Martin should have been able to sue. In short, this case is about holding the government accountable for its misdeeds. And make no mistake, the government is actively trying to dodge accountability for the entirely avoidable damage that it caused. As Reason's Billy Binion has noted, the Justice Department's arguments against accountability include the claim, apparently made with a straight face before SCOTUS, that it would have been too much to ask for those federal officers to pause in the driveway and check the address on the mailbox before storming the house. "That sort of decision is filled with policy tradeoffs because checking the house number at the end of the driveway," Assistant to the Solicitor General Frederick Liu told the justices, "means exposing the agents to potential lines of fire from the windows." If you listen to the audio recording of that oral argument, you can hear Justice Neil Gorsuch scoff out the word "really" in apparent disbelief while Liu made the above statement. Gorsuch then asked the government lawyer: "How about making sure you're on the right street? Is that…you know, asking too much?" To require the government to make amends for its misconduct should never be asking too much. A win for Tina Martin in this case is a win for greater government accountability overall. This is the case arising from President Donald Trump's executive order purporting to abolish birthright citizenship for the U.S.-born children of undocumented immigrants and temporary legal visitors, such as people holding a work visa. As I've previously argued, Trump's position is unconstitutional under the text, history, and original public meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment. If the Supreme Court rules on the merits of Trump's order, he deserves to lose 9–0. But this case is not exactly about the legality of that presidential decree. Rather, it is about whether federal district judges may issue nationwide injunctions that entirely block such presidential decrees from going into effect while the litigation against them plays out in court. Judging by last month's oral arguments, there is a chance that Trump will secure some kind of win on the nationwide injunctions issue. "Which is not exactly a surprise," as I wrote at the time, because several justices "are already on record as critics of the practice." It is possible that those critical justices will craft a technical ruling that avoids the birthright citizenship debate while at the same time using that debate as the opportunity to reach the result that they already wanted to reach on nationwide injunctions. But it is also possible that the Court will not be able to reach any kind of consensus. For its part, the Trump administration has made the sweeping claim that nationwide injunctions are always unconstitutional. Are there actually five justices on the Court willing to go that far? Maybe. But then again, maybe several justices would prefer to limit the practice without abolishing it outright. We may end up with a fractured opinion that ultimately settles little. The Supreme Court is currently scheduled to release its next batch of opinions on Thursday, June 12. We'll see what we get. One of the upsides of living in upstate New York is that there's a historic drive-in movie theater operating just a short distance away. The Hi-Way Drive-In first opened its gates in 1951 and recently kicked off its 2025 season. Attendees get to enjoy a nice mix of new releases and repertory favorites on the drive-in's four (count 'em!) huge outdoor screens. You're most likely to find me hanging around when there's a double-feature of horror classics on the bill, such as the memorable night a few years back when I caught George Romero's Dawn of the Dead followed by Romero's Day of the Dead. A bucket of fresh popcorn, a cool night breeze, and a horde of shambling zombies. What's not to love? The post 3 Supreme Court Cases To Watch in June 2025 appeared first on
