RUTHANN VEAL, Applicant-Appellant, vs. STATE OF IOWA, Respondent-Appellee.
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IN THE COURT OF APPEALS OF IOWA
No. 9-332 / 08-1207
Filed July 22, 2009
RUTHANN VEAL,
Applicant-Appellant,
vs.
STATE OF IOWA,
Respondent-Appellee.
________________________________________________________________
Appeal from the Iowa District Court for Black Hawk County, Bradley J.
Harris, Judge.
Ruthann Veal appeals the district court’s grant of the State’s motion to
dismiss her application for postconviction relief. AFFIRMED.
Philip B. Mears of Mears Law Office, Iowa City, and Aaryn M. Urell and
Bryan A. Stevenson of Equal Justice Initiative of Alabama, Montgomery,
Alabama, for appellant.
Thomas J. Miller, Attorney General, Thomas W. Andrews, Assistant
Attorney General, Thomas J. Ferguson, County Attorney, and Kimberly A.
Griffith, Assistant County Attorney, for appellee.
Heard by Sackett, C.J., and Vogel and Miller, JJ.
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MILLER, J.
Ruthann Veal appeals the district court’s grant of the State’s motion to
dismiss her application for postconviction relief. She claims the court erred in
concluding her application is time barred under Iowa Code section 822.3 (2007).
We affirm.
I.
BACKGROUND FACTS AND PROCEEDINGS.
From the evidence presented at trial of the underlying criminal charge
against Veal, a reasonable jury could have found the following facts.
Approximately sixteen years ago, on the evening of June 15, 1993, Veal was
running away from a juvenile group home in Waterloo. Veal was fourteen years
of age at that time.1 Waterloo police chased Veal on foot that evening, but she
successfully evaded them by ducking into a garage.
At some point Veal
apparently found the door of the victim’s Waterloo residence unlocked and
entered the empty home.
Around 9:00 p.m., sixty-six-year-old Catherine Haynes returned to her
unlocked Waterloo home from visiting a neighbor. A reasonable fact finder could
find from the evidence that Veal lurked in hiding behind an upstairs door with a
knife she had taken from a butcher block in Haynes’s kitchen, and then stabbed
the retired librarian as she entered or passed by the spare bedroom.
Veal
inflicted twenty-three separate stab wounds to Haynes’s head, neck, and torso.
There were also defensive wounds on Haynes’s arms and hands, including one
that nearly severed her ring finger. Veal stabbed her with such force that the
Veal’s birth date is July 20, 1978, and thus she was approximately five weeks from her
fifteenth birthday at the time of her crime.
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blade of the knife she was using snapped off. In addition, Veal beat Haynes’s
face and body, fracturing four of Haynes’s ribs. After Haynes collapsed on the
floor, Veal covered her with a bedspread while she continued her occupation of
the house, including making a number of long distance telephone calls from
Haynes’s residence to Veal’s family and friends. It appears that at some time
Haynes tried to reach the phone to call 911, because her blood was found near
the number nine on the phone. However, the handset had been severed from
the phone and was found lying next to Haynes’s body.
Around midnight Veal drove Haynes’s car to a Waterloo convenience
store where she displayed credit cards and offered to pay for several
acquaintances to accompany her to Cedar Rapids. Veal spent that night and the
next two days driving to various locations in Waterloo, Cedar Rapids, and Iowa
City making purchases by using cash, a checkbook, and credit cards stolen from
Haynes’s purse.
Haynes’s body was found by one of her neighbors on the
afternoon of June 16, 1993. Veal was apprehended by police on June 17 based
on a tip from the grandmother of one of her companions.
Veal was charged with first-degree murder, in violation of Iowa Code
section 707.2 (1993), a class “A” felony. On May 25, 1995, a jury found her guilty
as charged. The court sentenced her to life in prison, pursuant to Iowa Code
section 902.1, on November 13, 1995. Her conviction was affirmed on direct
appeal.
State v. Veal, 564 N.W.2d 797 (Iowa 1997).
Veal did not file a
postconviction application after her unsuccessful direct appeal and a writ of
procedendo was issued on June 17, 1997. Veal filed a petition for writ of habeas
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corpus in federal court on February 24, 1998. Relief was denied by the United
States District Court for the Northern District of Iowa, but the court certified for
appeal Veal’s claim she was denied a fair tribunal. On December 5, 2001, the
judgment of the district court denying habeas corpus relief was affirmed by the
United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit. Veal v. Iowa Corr. Inst. for
Women, 274 F.3d 479 (8th Cir. 2001), cert. denied, 537 U.S. 834, 123 S. Ct. 142,
154 L. Ed. 2d 51(2002).
Veal filed the current application for postconviction relief on February 28,
2008, contending that a sentence of “life imprisonment without parole”2 for a
crime she committed while only fourteen years of age violated the Eighth and
Fourteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution and Iowa law. The
A person convicted of a class “A” felony is sentenced to custody “for the rest of the
defendant’s life” and “shall not be released on parole unless the governor commutes the
sentence to a term of years.” Iowa Code § 902.1 (1993, 2009). The governor’s authority
to commute a sentence of life imprisonment to a term of years flows from the Iowa
Constitution and implementing statutes. See Iowa Const. art. IV, § 16 (granting the
governor the “power to grant . . . commutations . . . after conviction, for all offences
except treason and cases of impeachment, subject to such regulations as may be
provided by law”); Iowa Code § 914.1 (2009) (providing that the power of the governor to
grant a commutation of sentence shall not be impaired); id. ch. 914 (providing
procedures for applications, recommendations, and consideration of commutation
requests); id. § 902.2 (authorizing a person sentenced to life imprisonment to make
periodic applications requesting commutation to a term of years, and authorizing the
director of the Iowa department of corrections to request commutation of a person’s
sentence to a term of years). A person whose sentence has been commuted to a term
of years becomes eligible for release on parole. See id. § 906.1 (defining parole as the
release of a person, subject to supervision and conditions, “which release occurs prior to
the expiration of the person’s term”).
Certain circumstances supportive of commutation in appropriate cases have
been suggested by Iowa’s attorney general. See 1937 Op. Iowa Att’y Gen. 334 (opining,
in a case involving a sentence of life imprisonment, that the sentence, “by appropriate
action of the governor and board of parole . . . may be hereafter modified as the equities
of the situation and the good behavior of the convict may render such change desirable”
(emphasis added)). It thus readily appears that although Veal’s initial sentence is “life
imprisonment without parole,” the possibility of parole in fact exists if she has maintained
consistent good behavior and the governor should find equity, including her background
and her age at the time of her crime, conviction, and sentence, in her situation.
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State filed a motion to dismiss, arguing Veal’s application was barred pursuant to
Iowa Code section 822.3 (2007) as it had been significantly more than three
years since the June 17, 1997 procedendo had issued. Veal argued the law had
changed since the time of her sentencing, based on Roper v. Simmons, 543 U.S.
551, 125 S. Ct. 1183, 161 L. Ed. 2d 1 (2005). She asserted that the exception to
the three-year statute of limitations in section 822.3 applied because there was a
new “ground of fact or law that could not have been raised within the applicable
time period.”
Following a hearing the district court granted the State’s motion to dismiss.
In granting the State’s motion the court determined the exception under 822.3 did
not apply. The court concluded,
The Roper case has not changed the law regarding a life
sentence for a juvenile offender.
....
The court . . . determines that there has been no change in the law
regarding the sentencing of juveniles in non-capital cases and
therefore no ground of fact or law that could not have been raised
within the applicable time period.”
Veal appeals the district court’s grant of the State’s motion to dismiss,
contending in relevant part that the court erred in determining her application is
time barred under section 822.3.
II.
SCOPE AND STANDARDS OF REVIEW.
We review the dismissal of an application for postconviction relief to
correct errors of law. Iowa R. App. P. 6.4; Dible v. State, 557 N.W.2d 881, 883
(Iowa 1996), abrogated in part on other grounds by Harrington v. State, 659
N.W.2d 509, 520-21 (Iowa 2003); Brown v. State, 589 N.W.2d 273, 274 (Iowa Ct.
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App. 1998). A postconviction proceeding is a law action, ordinarily reviewed for
errors of law. Bugley v. State, 596 N.W.2d 893, 895 (Iowa 1999).
III.
MERITS.
Iowa Code section 822.3 regarding the filing of postconviction applications
provides, in relevant part,
applications must be filed within three years from the date the
conviction or decision is final or, in the event of an appeal, from the
date the writ of procedendo is issued. However, this limitation does
not apply to a ground of fact or law that could not have been raised
within the applicable time period.
Following Veal’s unsuccessful direct appeal of her conviction, the writ of
procedendo was issued on June 17, 1997. Her application for postconviction
relief was filed on February 28, 2008.
Thus, clearly the application was
significantly past the three-year statute of limitation set forth in section 822.3.
However, Veal contends the exception in 822.3 to this limitation applies here
because there is a ground of law that could not have been raised within the
applicable time period. More specifically, she argues that applicable law has
changed since the time of her sentencing based on the United States Supreme
Court’s opinion in Roper.
In a five-four decision the Supreme Court in Roper held that the Eighth
and Fourteenth Amendments forbid the imposition of the death penalty on
offenders who were under eighteen years of age at the time they committed their
capital crime. Roper, 534 U.S. at 578, 125 S. Ct. at 1200, 161 L. Ed. 2d at 28.
Under this holding we read Roper to be strictly a death penalty case. Therefore,
we do not believe Roper has any application outside the capital punishment
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context. Iowa does not have the death penalty. Accordingly, we agree with the
district court that Roper provided no change in the law regarding sentencing of
juveniles in non-capital cases and therefore did not provide a “ground of fact or
law” that could not have been raised within the applicable time period that would
allow Veal to avoid the time bar set forth in section 822.3.
Furthermore, and perhaps more importantly, at the time Veal committed
her crime in 1993 at the age of fourteen the Supreme Court had already
concluded that the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments prohibit the execution of
a person who was under sixteen years of age at the time of his or her offense.
Thompson v. Oklahoma, 487 U.S. 815, 838, 108 S. Ct. 2687, 2700, 101 L. Ed.
2d 702, 720 (1988).
Roper did nothing more than extend the rational of
Thompson to include sixteen and seventeen year old offenders.
Therefore,
assuming without deciding that these death penalty cases were to apply by
analogy to a case involving life imprisonment such as the one before us, it is
clear that at the time of Veal’s crime, conviction, sentence, direct appeal, and the
issuance of procedendo, well-established law already provided that the Eighth
Amendment prohibited the execution of persons who were her age (fourteen) at
the time they committed their crime. Id. Thus, Roper cannot provide Veal a new
ground of law that would allow her to circumvent the three-year statute of
limitations in section 822.3.
Accordingly, we conclude Veal had multiple opportunities before the threeyear statute of limitations ran to raise the Eighth Amendment claim she is now
presenting. She could have raised it during her criminal trial, on direct appeal, or
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in a timely postconviction application. “The legal and factual underpinnings of
each of [Veal’s] claims were in existence during the three-year period and were
available to be addressed” in Veal’s prior proceedings.
Smith v. State, 542
N.W.2d 853, 854 (Iowa Ct. App. 1995). As set forth above, the Supreme Court
had already determined the Eighth Amendment prohibited the execution of a
person who was under sixteen years of age at the time of his or her offense.
Thompson, 487 U.S. at 838, 108 S. Ct. at 2700, 101 L. Ed. 2d at 720. “The issue
is not whether [her] present claims were previously raised, it is whether they
could have been raised during the three-year time period.” Smith, 542 N.W.2d at
854. Here Veal’s Eighth Amendment claim clearly could have been raised during
the three-year period because the legal underpinnings for it were in existence
and
available
to
her
throughout
her underlying
criminal
proceedings.
Accordingly, we conclude the district court was correct in granting the State’s
motion to dismiss.
Veal attempts to raise a claim that her counsel was ineffective for failing to
raise the issue of the alleged Eighth Amendment violation at an earlier time.
However, our prior case law is clear that a claim of ineffective assistance of
counsel does not constitute a claim that “could not have been raised within the
applicable time period” under section 822.3. Whitsel v. State, 525 N.W.2d 860,
864 (Iowa 1994); Wilkins v. State, 522 N.W.2d 822, 823 (Iowa 1994).
If the legislature had intended that ineffective assistance of counsel
serve as an exception to the statute of limitations [in section 822.3],
it would have said so. It certainly knew how to do so, as shown by
the language it used in section 822.8.
Dible, 557 N.W.2d at 885.
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IV.
CONCLUSION.
For the reasons set forth above, we conclude the district court was correct
in determining Veal did not assert any ground of fact or law that could not have
been raised within the applicable time period, and thus her postconviction
application is time barred under section 822.3. We affirm the court’s grant of the
State’s motion to dismiss.
AFFIRMED.
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