County attorney resists Lindaman motion to suppress evidence

By Bob Steenson, bsteenson@charlescitypress.com

Motions continue to mount as the retrial of Douglas Lindaman on a 3rd-degree sexual abuse charge ramps up.

Floyd County Attorney Rachel Ginbey filed a motion Wednesday resisting a motion by Lindaman to suppress evidence that was introduced in the original trial in April 2016.

She also asked the court to set a hearing to determine if Lindaman will again represent himself or hire an attorney.

Lindaman is facing trial again after a three-justice panel of the Iowa Supreme Court reversed his conviction from last year, ruling that the judge at that trial had failed to adequately protect Lindaman’s right to be represented by counsel when Lindaman decided to represent himself.

Although Lindaman was represented by counsel from the state appellate defender’s office for his appeal, most of the motions in the case, including several during the appeals process, have been filed by Lindaman himself.

Lindaman had made a motion last week, before being transferred from state prison back to Floyd County and released on bond this week, to suppress interviews between him and agents of the Iowa Division of Criminal Investigation.

“During the trial on Thursday, April 7, 2016 … the county attorney disclosed that the recording devices would malfunction & skip recording testimony. This disclosure was timed after the county attorney used Lindaman’s statements in her case before the jury,” Lindaman wrote.

“Accordingly, the recorded verbal statements are inherently unreliable and must be suppressed under Due Process of the 14th Amendment to U.S. Constitution and Article I, Section 9 Iowa Constitution,” he wrote.

On Wednesday Ginbey filed a resistance to Lindaman’s motion, arguing that motions to suppress must be filed no later than 40 days after arraignment.

“The defendant’s motion should be denied as it was not filed timely and no new evidence exists to justify the late filing,” Ginbey wrote.

She continued, “The state denies the allegations made by the defendant. … No recordings in this case malfunctioned or skipped recording as suggested by the defendant. No evidence exists to support that assertion by the defendant.”

Lindaman was charged in 2015 with having sexually touched a 17-year-old boy in 2011, after hiring the boy as a farmhand. Lindaman argued that he touched the boy “therapeutically” to help him get over a previous sexual injury.

Lindaman was convicted at a jury trial April 12, 2016, in Charles City, on one count of sexual abuse in the third degree, and sentenced to serve up to 10 years in state prison.

Floyd County District Court Judge Gregg Rosenbladt this week set July 17 for a pretrial conference on the case, and set Aug. 1 for the new trial to begin.