Appeals court affirms Lindaman sex registry conviction

By Bob Steenson, bsteenson@charlescitypress.com

The Iowa Court of Appeals upheld the conviction of a Charles City man for failure to register as a sex offender in a ruling issued this week.

The three-judge panel ruled Wednesday that Douglas K. Lindaman, age 64, was required to register even though he had appealed his 2018 conviction for assault with intent to commit sexual abuse.

The Iowa Court of Appeals and the Iowa Supreme Court had earlier this year affirmed the conviction on the assault charge.

In the failure to register case, Lindaman had argued that his appeal “set aside” the conviction, and therefore he was not required to register until the appeal had been decided. He also raised several other arguments regarding the judge’s decisions during the trial and constitutional issues regarding the sentence.

The appeals court rejected Lindaman’s arguments and ruled that some of them were not eligible to be considered on appeal because the arguments had not been raised during trial, or because they involved the underlying case of the assault charge rather than the charge of failure to register on the sex offender list.

The appeals court ruled that the district trial court had acted correctly in not allowing Lindaman to tell the jury his legal interpretation of the registry requirements, because interpreting the law to the jury is a matter for the judge.

The appeals court ruled that under the Iowa Code, a person is “convicted” if found guilty in court, and filing an appeal does not “set aside” that conviction.

“Lindaman’s interpretation of the law was incorrect, as the district court repeatedly ruled in pretrial motions and during trial,” the appeals court wrote in its ruling. “We see no error in the court’s interpretation of the relevant law and no abuse of discretion in its refusal to allow Lindaman to espouse his misinterpretation of the law to the jury.”

Lindaman also raised issues of bias and the trial court’s rejection of his attempt to submit a 60-item questionnaire to potential jury members to ascertain “bias over sexual issues” because Lindaman has identified as gay.

“Lindaman was the only party to bring up his sexual orientation. We find no error in the court’s handling of this issue,” the appeals court wrote.

Also, the appeals court wrote, “Lindaman accuses the prosecutor and the trial judge of misconduct by engaging in acts which ‘inflict public spite and ridicule upon the gay defendant.’ We find no basis in fact or law for his accusations.”

Lindaman had eventually registered on the Iowa sexual offenders registry after being taken into custody on the failure to register charge and being required to register by a magistrate judge as a condition of his release.

Lindaman had originally been charged with sexually touching the genitals of a 17-year-old boy in 2011 without the boy’s consent, while the boy was working for Lindaman on his farm.

Lindaman had originally been convicted on the charge of sexual abuse in the third degree, a Class C felony, in 2016, and had been serving a sentence of up to 10 years in state prison when the Iowa Supreme Court overturned the conviction because of a trial error.

A retrial, held in Franklin County on a change of venue, quickly ended in a mistrial after two prosecution witnesses implied during testimony that Lindaman had served time in prison. The judge had ordered that Lindaman’s criminal history could not be brought up in front of the jury.

In the second retrial on the assault charge, held back in Floyd County District Court, the jury found Lindaman not guilty of the felony sexual abuse charge, but guilty of a lesser charge of assault with intent to commit sexual abuse, an aggravated misdemeanor.

Lindaman was sentenced to up to two years in prison, ordered to life-long registration on the Iowa sex offenders registry, and was given a 10-year “special sentence” under Iowa law that puts sexual offenders under a kind of probation supervision.

Lindaman had appealed that conviction, again challenging decisions made during jury selection, the use of an expert witness and an incorrect date citation on the original charging document by the Floyd County attorney.

In that case the Iowa Court of Appeals also affirmed the conviction, writing in its ruling issued April 16 this year, “On the jury selection issue, we find Lindaman unable to show prejudice. We find no error in the district court’s rulings on the expert witness, Lindaman’s sentence, or the trial information. We thus affirm his conviction.”

After that conviction was affirmed, the Floyd County Attorney’s Office moved for Lindaman to be taken into custody to serve the two-year sentence that had been issued.

But Lindaman successfully argued that his previous time in prison on the original sexual assault conviction plus jail time served in connection with the case totaled 420 days of confinement, which was enough to satisfy the amount of time typically served in Iowa on a sentence of two years.

Lindaman continued to raise issues of law or procedure on the assault conviction, which the original trial judge, District Court Judge Gregg Rosenbladt, denied, writing in June that the questions had either already been answered by the Court of Appeals or that he was denying them himself in that ruling.

Lindaman appealed Rosenbladt’s ruling, and the Iowa Supreme Court last month denied further review on the assault conviction.