State of Iowa v. Juan Jose Mendoza, Jr.

• Court: Court of Appeals of Iowa
• Decided: September 27, 2023
• Docket: 22-1811
• Status: Published

Opinion

IN THE COURT OF APPEALS OF IOWA

No. 22-1811 Filed September 27, 2023

STATE OF IOWA, Plaintiff-Appellee,

vs.

JUAN JOSE MENDOZA JR., Defendant-Appellant. ________________________________________________________________

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

Associate Judge.

Juan Mendoza Jr. appeals his conviction 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.*

*Senior judge assigned by order pursuant to Iowa Code section 602.9206

(2023). 2

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

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 3

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 (permitting 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).

1 The Iowa Rules of Criminal Procedure were amended in 2022, with an effective

date of July 1, 2023. As all events at issue in this appeal occurred before the effective date of the changes, all references to the rules of criminal procedure will be to rules before the 2022 amendments. 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))).

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

2 Mendoza does not dispute that he and his attorney knew or should have known

of the claimed deficiency in the electronic signature at the time the trial information was filed, so his motion had to be filed within thirty days of the filing of the trial information in order to be timely if rule 16.305(7) controls. 5

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.

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 6

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 EDMS[3] 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)(1), (3).

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

3 EDMS is the Iowa Judicial Branch’s electronic document management system.

Iowa R. Elec. P. 16.101(1). 7

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 pertains to signatures. We reject

Mendoza’s effort to read Fiems as imposing verified-signature requirements on a

trial information.

Instead, we look to our rules to determine the signature requirements. We

start with rule of criminal procedure 2.5(2), which requires an information to “be

signed by the prosecuting attorney.” Not verified. Not under oath. Just signed.

As this information was filed electronically, we next turn to our electronic

filing rules to determine the requirements for signing a document. For purposes of

electronically filing a document by a registered filer such as the prosecutor here, a

“signature” means: 8

the registered filer’s login and password, accompanied by one of the following approved signature representations and a block of identifying information as described in rule 16.305(4) (signature block): .... 2. “Electronic signature” means an electronic symbol, either “/s/” or “/efiler’s name/,” that a person has executed or adopted with the intent to sign the document.

Iowa R. Elec. P. 16.201(35). Of note, although the examples in the comment to

the signature-block rule (rule 16.305(4)) show “/s/” followed by the typed name of

the filer, rule 16.201(35) does not require both “/s/” and the filer’s name—it only

requires one or the other. Further, the comments serve only as explanations and

are not part of the rules. Iowa R. Elec. P. 16.101(2). So, the prosecutor’s use of

“/s/” alone, coupled with the other requirements of the signature (i.e., the

prosecutor’s login and password and a signature block) sufficed as a signature

within our electronic filing rules.4 Further, even if both “/s/” and the typed name of

the filer were required, nothing states they have to be on the same line. So, the

“/s/” on one line and the typed name on the next would satisfy the rules even if

both were required.

Because the prosecutor’s signature on the trial information was not required

to be verified and met the requirements for a “signature” under our rules, there was

no defect in the signature or the trial information. The district court was correct in

denying Mendoza’s motion to dismiss.

4 Mendoza makes no claim that the prosecutor’s login credentials or the contents

of the signature block contained in the trial information were in any way deficient. 9

C. Prejudice

Even if Mendoza’s motion had been timely and the signature on the trial

information was defective in some way, Mendoza was not entitled to the remedy

of dismissal. The last paragraph of Iowa Rule of Criminal Procedure 2.4(7) states,

“No indictment is invalid or insufficient, nor can the trial, judgment, or other

proceeding thereon be affected by reason of any defect or imperfection in a matter

of form which does not prejudice a substantial right of the defendant.” This rule

applies both to an indictment and a trial information. Iowa R. Crim. P. 2.5(5).

Mendoza cites State v. Crees in support of his claim that dismissal is the

proper remedy when a ground for dismissal has been timely raised and

established. 474 N.W.2d 282, 284 (Iowa Ct. App. 1991). But Crees does not

address the rule cited above that requires prejudice before a trial information can

be invalidated, so we do not find it informative of the issue at hand. Further, Crees

involved a trial information approved by a district associate judge that did not have

authority to approve it, thus undermining the purpose of the rule requiring an

appropriate judge’s oversight and approval. Id. We have no such undermining of

purpose here. Crees would not control the outcome here even if the signing rules

were violated and Mendoza had timely objected.

The purpose of a trial information is to notify the defendant of the crime

charged so the defendant has the opportunity to prepare a defense. State v. Grice,

515 N.W.2d 20, 22 (Iowa 1994). Mendoza does not claim the alleged defect in the

signing of the trial information impaired his ability to mount a defense. Instead, he

argues he was prejudiced because he stipulated to a trial on the minutes of

testimony to ensure he could raise the motion-to-dismiss issue on direct appeal. 10

But the rule requires that the defect itself cause him prejudice. See Iowa R. Crim.

P. 2.4(7). The signature on the trial information did not prevent Mendoza from

mounting a defense or making an informed choice about how he wished to

proceed. Because Mendoza was not prejudiced, if any defect existed, it would not

be grounds for dismissal.

IV. Conclusion

Mendoza made an untimely objection to the trial information based on the

claim of an invalid signature. Even if the objection had been timely, the

prosecutor’s signature complied with the Iowa Rules of Criminal Procedure and

the Iowa Rules of Electronic Procedure. Finally, even if Mendoza’s objection had

been timely and the prosecutor’s signature was defective, Mendoza has not shown

prejudice. The district court got it right when it denied Mendoza’s motion to

dismiss.