STATE OF IOWA, Plaintiff-Appellee, vs. JOSHUA JAMES JACOBSEN, Defendant-Appellant.
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IN THE COURT OF APPEALS OF IOWA
No. 7-608 / 06-1867
Filed October 24, 2007
STATE OF IOWA,
Plaintiff-Appellee,
vs.
JOSHUA JAMES JACOBSEN,
Defendant-Appellant.
________________________________________________________________
Appeal from the Iowa District Court for Black Hawk County, James D. Coil
and Nathan A. Callahan, District Associate Judges.
Joshua Jacobsen appeals from the district court’s denial of his motion to
suppress evidence and alleges ineffective assistance of counsel. REVERSED
AND REMANDED.
Michael M. Pedersen, Waterloo, for appellant.
Thomas J. Miller, Attorney General, Linda Hines, Assistant Attorney
General, Thomas J. Ferguson, County Attorney, and Brett Schilling, Assistant
County Attorney, for appellee.
Heard by Mahan, P.J., and Miller and Vaitheswaran, JJ.
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VAITHESWARAN, J.
Police officers mistakenly identified Joshua James Jacobsen as the
Jacobsen named in an outstanding warrant. The dispositive question on appeal
is whether that mistaken identification was reasonable.
I.
Background Facts and Proceedings
A convenience store employee called police to report two suspicious men
lingering behind the store. Evansdale police officers responded to the call. They
found Jacobsen and his friend behind the store by the air pumps. One of the
officers asked the men for identification. Both provided their driver’s licenses.
The officer radioed the dispatcher to check for outstanding warrants. He
testified that he believed he provided the dispatcher with Jacobsen’s first, middle,
and last name, but he was not sure. He did not provide a birth date, social
security number or physical description. The dispatcher responded that there
were no outstanding warrants. The officer gave the licenses back to the men
and told them to “be on their way.”
When the officers returned to the patrol car, the dispatcher informed them
there was a warrant on “James Jacobson” or “Joshua Jacobsen.” After receiving
this information, one of the officers again made contact with Jacobsen and told
him about the warrant. Jacobsen denied its existence and asked the officers to
check it against his social security number. The officers did not immediately do
so.
A search incident to arrest turned up marijuana and methamphetamine.
After the arrest and search, officers discovered that the middle name and the
birth date on the outstanding warrant were not the same as Jacobsen’s.
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The State charged Jacobsen with two counts of possession of a controlled
substance under Iowa Code section 124.401(5) (2005).
Jacobsen moved to
suppress the evidence obtained during the search incident to arrest. Following a
hearing, the district court denied the motion. Jacobsen waived his right to a jury
trial and stipulated to a trial on the minutes of testimony. The district court found
Jacobsen guilty of both counts and this appeal followed.
II.
Preservation of Error/Ineffective Assistance of Counsel
On appeal Jacobsen makes four arguments: (1) “did counsel provide
adequate representation (Sixth Amendment) by failing to assert Fourth
Amendment analysis of initial encounter,” (2) “whether the trial court erred in
allowing officers to arrest defendant before confirming his identity,” (3) “whether
the trial court erred in finding defendant guilty on evidence which should have
been inadmissible,” and (4) “whether the knowledge of the dispatcher is
imputable to officers.” The State argues error was not preserved on the first,
third, and fourth issues but concedes error was preserved on the second issue.
Ineffective assistance of counsel claims operate as an exception to the
error preservation rules. State v. Lucas, 323 N.W.2d 228, 232 (Iowa 1982). At
oral arguments, appellate defense counsel indicated that all four issues would
need to be reviewed under an ineffective-assistance-of-counsel rubric. His brief,
however, frames the second issue in terms of trial court error rather than
ineffective assistance, and the State’s concession that error was preserved on
that issue is supported by the record. For this reason, we will afford appellate
defense counsel the benefit of the doubt as to error preservation on the second
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issue and we will not review that issue as an ineffective-assistance-of-counsel
claim.
III.
Reasonableness of Officer’s Misidentification
Jacobsen contends the district court “err[ed] in finding the officers’
disregard of obvious identification problems to be reasonable.” He maintains his
identity “was readily ascertainable” and the officers, therefore, “had a duty to
clear up the confusion before making the arrest rather than after.”
The law on arrests based on mistaken identity is as follows. When police
officers have probable cause to arrest one person and they reasonably mistake a
second person for the first, the arrest of the second person is a valid arrest. Hill
v. California, 401 U.S. 797, 802, 91 S. Ct. 1106, 1110, 28 L. Ed. 2d 484, 488-89
(1971).
“[S]ufficient
probability,
not
certainty,
is
the
touchstone
of
reasonableness under the Fourth Amendment.” Hill, 401 U.S. at 803, 91 S. Ct.
at 1111, 28 L. Ed. 2d at 490.
There is no question the police officers had probable cause to arrest the
person identified in the warrant.
There is also no question that the officers
mistook Defendant Jacobsen for the Jacobsen identified in the warrant. The key
question is whether that mistake was reasonable. On our de novo review of this
constitutional issue, we conclude it was not.
The officers took Jacobsen’s driver’s license to check for outstanding
warrants.
The license contained his name as well as additional identifying
information, as required by Iowa Code section 321.189(2)(a). Nonetheless, the
officers only gave the dispatcher Jacobsen’s name. This was unreasonable.
See Simons v. County of Marin, 682 F. Supp. 1463, 1472 (N.D. Cal. 1987)
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(finding reasonableness of mistaken identification was issue of triable fact where
“there was little if any reason, other than a superficial congruence of names, to
believe that the plaintiff was in fact the man sought by the warrant”);
Commonwealth v. Pinney, 378 A.2d 293, 295-96 (Pa. 1977) (holding mistake
was unreasonable where officers had physical description of person wanted for
murder and defendant did not exactly fit description and provided identification
showing his name did not match name of wanted person). Cf. Sanders v. United
States, 339 A.2d 373, 378-79 (D.C. Ct. App. 1975) (holding mistake was
reasonable where first and last name matched, descriptions similar, and
admission by defendant of corroborating fact); State v. Payton II, 401 N.W.2d
219 (Iowa Ct. App. 1986) (holding name, coupled with absence of driver’s license
and registration supported finding that officer was acting under reasonable belief
that defendant was the person named in warrant); People v. Gordon, 723 N.E.2d
1249, 1256 (Ill. App. Ct. 2000) (holding mistake reasonable where name, sex,
race, and date of birth either matched or nearly matched warrant); State v.
Bateman, 99 P.3d 656, 660 (Mont. 2004) (holding mistake was reasonable where
defendant was similar age, lived in same area, and had similar physical
characteristics as person in warrant and where “the officers quickly sought to
verify whether Bateman’s protests regarding mistaken identity were true”); City of
Tulsa v. Clifford, 787 P.2d 1285, 1286-87 (Okla. Crim. App. 1990) (holding
mistake reasonable where defendant was twin brother of person named in
warrant; driver’s license check showed no license for defendant, but did show a
license for his brother; and passenger in defendant’s car had no knowledge of a
twin); State v. Navanick, 987 P.2d 1276, 1280 (Utah 1999) (stating mistake was
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reasonable where defendant’s first and last name and date of birth exactly
matched name and date of birth on warrant and there were other circumstances
supporting this defendant’s arrest).
Even after Jacobsen informed the officers he was not the person identified
in the warrant and told them to verify the warrant against his social security
number, the officers did not do so, electing instead to proceed with the arrest.
Although “aliases and false identifications are not uncommon” in this context, Hill,
401 U.S. at 803, 91 S. Ct. at 1110, 28 L. Ed. at 489, one court has aptly stated
that, “[s]hould doubt as to the correct identity of the subject of warrant arise, the
arresting officer obviously should make immediate reasonable efforts to confirm
or deny the applicability of the warrant to the detained individual.” Navanick, 987
P.2d at 1270 (quoting Sanders, 339 A.2d at 379).
Under these circumstances, we conclude the mistaken identification was
not reasonable, and the police were not “entitled to do what the law would have
allowed them to do” if Jacobsen had been the person identified in the warrant,
“that is, to search incident to arrest and to seize evidence of the crime the police
had probable cause to believe [the person named in the arrest warrant] had
committed.” Hill, 401 U.S. at 804, 91 S. Ct. at 1111, 28 L. Ed. 2d at 490.
We find it unnecessary to decide or preserve the remaining issues. We
reverse the district court’s denial of Jacobsen’s motion to suppress and remand
for further proceedings consistent with this opinion.
REVERSED AND REMANDED.
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