Essential Estrogen

The Iowa Court of Appeals has reviewed two lower-court criminal verdicts and found them lacking. Both cases were reversed today and ordered back to their respective district court for a new trial.

A case from Scott County District Court involves the jury conviction of Gregory Glenn for assault and domestic abuse assault. In the appeal Glenn contended that he was denied the right to confront his accuser. During the trial the alleged victim did not appear or testify. The court allowed prior statements from the alleged victim to be admitted as evidence against Glenn.

The appellate court reversed both the conviction and sentence against Glenn, stating that the admission "of this evidence was erroneous" and "violated Glenn's Confrontation Clause rights."

In a similar case in Black Hawk County District Court, Earl Denson Mosley Jr. appealed his jury conviction for two counts of second-degree and one count of third-degree sexual abuse against his stepdaughter. During the course of the trial, the state allowed an older stepdaughter to testify of "suggestive remarks, slaps on the clothed buttocks, and a claim that Mosley saw [the girl] naked through a keyhole." The state argued that the testimony would serve as proof of Mosley's modus operandi, or defining characteristics of a criminal pattern.

The appellate court dismissed that assertion and ruled that the testimony, being dissimilar to the level of abuse claimed by the younger stepdaughter, was provided only "to bolster" the younger stepdaughter's credibility and "to paint Mosley as a lewd man with a general propensity to commit wrongful acts." The appellate court decision called upon a 2001 Iowa Supreme Court ruling on a similar case, which stated that "such testimony spoke to no legitimate fact besides [defendant's] propensity to abuse young girls."

"We conclude this evidence served little more than to appeal to the jury's sympathies and provoke its instincts to punish," wrote Judge Gayle Nelson Vogel in the ruling.