Miscellaneous

On Fridays, we often get the pleasure of reading new Iowa Supreme Court opinions, and we are not disappointed today. We get two opinions, one a criminal appeal based on the admission of hearsay evidence and the other a family law appeal regarding the differences between joint physical care and extraordinary visitation for the purposes of figuring child support.

State v. Reynolds deals with the business records exception to the hearsay rule, which is very timely for me, as I may be dealing with the same issue in a trial next week. The defendant in Reynolds was convicted of forgery and theft based on email messages a bank received from the Federal Reserve telling them that the numerous money orders the defendant had cashed there were counterfeit. The Court of Appeals upheld the conviction, but the Supreme Court ordered a new trial because the State didn’t present any evidence of how the email messages were made and defense counsel failed to object to a bank employee’s testimony about the messages. They were apparently computer-generated, but there was no evidence of whether the information in the messages was actually created by the computer based on a formula (which is non-hearsay, by the way) or was input into the computer based upon human opinion or observation (which is hearsay). As a result, there was ineffective assistance of counsel and the defendant gets a new trial.

Seay v. Thomas deals with joint physical care and the child support guidelines. Here, a judge ordered that the parents would have joint physical care of the children and set a specific schedule of care that gave the mother 48 more days of care than the father. The judge ordered child support based on the rules governing extraordinary visitation rather than joint physical care. The Court of Appeals again upheld the order, but the Supreme Court vacated it and remanded the case. The Court didn’t disturb the order for joint physical care because nobody raised the issue, but it did order that the child support should have been based upon the rules governing joint physical care.

Now, it appears that in Seay the Court is elevating form over substance: If the order says joint physical care, the joint physical care rules apply. But, near the end of the opinion the Court reminds the district court judge that you can deviate from the Child Support Guidelines if the result would be unjust. So, I imagine the final result will be an order that is substantially the same, but that includes a statement that the result of the Guidelines would be unjust and there is a need to deviate from them.

One of the things I find really interesting about this case, and about a lot of the Supreme Court cases I’ve been reading lately, is that they are on further review from the Court of Appeals and that the Court of Appeals got it wrong. I don’t have any empirical information to support this, but it really feels that way to me.

Fun stuff.