Clark v. State

• Decision Date: 26 February 2021
• Docket Number: No. 19-1558,19-1558
• Citation: 955 N.W.2d 459
• Parties: Donald CLARK, Appellee, v. STATE of Iowa, Appellant.
• Court: Iowa Supreme Court

955 N.W.2d 459

Donald CLARK, Appellee,

v.STATE of Iowa, Appellant.

No. 19-1558

Supreme Court of Iowa.

Submitted December 16, 2020

Filed February 26, 2021

Thomas J. Miller, Attorney General, Jeffrey S. Thompson, Solicitor General, Noah Goerlitz and David M. Ranscht, Assistant Attorneys General, for appellant.

Frank J. Nidey and Clemens A. Erdahl of Nidey, Erdahl, Meier & Araguas, P.L.C., Cedar Rapids, and Thomas P. Frerichs of Frerichs Law Office, P.C., Waterloo, for appellee.

Oxley, J., delivered the opinion of the court, in which all justices joined.

OXLEY, Justice.

A criminal defendant who successfully overturns his conviction based on ineffective assistance of counsel may bring a legal malpractice action against his former attorney. Can he then use that successful action to stop his former attorney from claiming he did not breach any duties in the subsequent malpractice action? That question turns on application of the doctrine of issue preclusion, which allows a party to rely on an issue decided in one proceeding to affirmatively establish the same issue in a later proceeding, as long as the party against whom the doctrine is used had a full and fair opportunity to litigate the issue in the first proceeding. Here, a criminal defendant, represented at trial by a state public defender, brought a malpractice action against the State as the public defender's employer. He now seeks to invoke issue preclusion based on his prior successful ineffective assistance claims to establish the breach element of his malpractice claim as a matter of law. We must decide whether the fact that the State was the named defendant in both actions—defending the State's conviction in the postconviction-relief proceeding and defending its public defender employee in this malpractice action—brings issue preclusion into play.

For the reasons that follow, we conclude it does not.

I. Factual Background and Proceedings.

In 2010, Donald Clark was convicted of second-degree sexual abuse and received an indeterminate twenty-five-year sentence. State v. Clark , 814 N.W.2d 551, 560 (Iowa 2012). The alleged abuse took place during the 2003–2004 school year when Clark was a counselor at an elementary school and worked with a fifth-grade student who accused Clark of inappropriately touching him during a counseling session in Clark's school office. Id. at 554. There were no witnesses to the alleged abuse and no physical evidence, so the trial came down to a "he said, he said" credibility contest. Clark's conviction was affirmed on appeal, and we left Clark's ineffective-assistance-of-counsel claims for further development in postconviction-relief (PCR) proceedings. Id. at 560, 567.

Clark immediately filed a PCR action in August 2012, seeking a new trial based on two grounds: ineffective assistance of counsel and newly discovered evidence. State public defender John Robertson represented Clark in his criminal trial.¹ A key point of contention during the criminal trial involved the line of sight into, and the layout of, Clark's school office. Clark claimed Robertson failed to investigate the scene or offer photographs of the office into evidence to rebut the misleading pictures offered by the prosecution. Clark also claimed Robertson failed to inform him about depositions of key witnesses who testified about the school layout, preventing Clark from assisting in his defense. Without this information, Robertson was unable to effectively rebut the prosecution's evidence. Finally, Clark argued Robertson failed to present character witnesses after other "bad act" evidence about Clark was admitted at trial.

To support his claim that newly discovered evidence also entitled him to a new trial, Clark offered the student's subsequent testimony in a parallel civil case the student and his family brought against Clark. The student testified he had not been fully truthful in the criminal case and described other occasions when Clark allegedly touched him inappropriately. Clark presented evidence that questioned whether the new allegations could have occurred as the student testified, which, coupled with the student's admission he was not fully truthful, called into doubt the student's credibility.

The PCR court found Clark was entitled to a new trial based on both the ineffective-assistance claims and the newly discovered evidence. The State did not appeal the PCR ruling and declined to prosecute Clark a second time. The charges against Clark were dismissed in July 2016, over six years after he was convicted.

Following his successful PCR action, Clark brought a legal malpractice action to recover money damages. Because Robertson was a state employee in the public defender's office, Clark filed the malpractice action against the State of Iowa. See Iowa Code § 669.5(2)(a ) (2019). Clark filed an offensive motion for partial summary judgment, asserting that the breach-of-duty element of his malpractice claim was conclusively established by the PCR ruling under the doctrine of issue preclusion.

In resistance, the State argued the standard used to judge counsel's conduct in the ineffective assistance of counsel context is different than the standard used in the malpractice context. The State then argued even if the elements of issue preclusion were met, there was a lack of mutuality between the two cases because, even though the State was the named defendant in both actions, it served in significantly different capacities. Finally, the State argued even if the State could be considered the same party in both cases, other circumstances counseled against using issue preclusion in this context.

Initially, the district court denied Clark's motion for partial summary judgment on the basis that the standard applied to counsel's performance under a Strickland² ineffective-assistance-of-counsel analysis is different than the standard of care required to support a legal malpractice claim. The court therefore did not address the State's other arguments. On reconsideration, the district court changed course, concluding the standards for an attorney's conduct are sufficiently similar in both contexts to amount to the same issue under the first prong of issue preclusion. Because the State did not contest the remaining issue preclusion elements, the district court found all elements satisfied.

The district court then addressed, and rejected, the State's argument that its status as defendant in the malpractice action was different from its status as defendant in the PCR action such that there was a lack of mutuality of parties. The district court concluded that the State, through the Johnson County Attorney's office, controlled the strategy in defending against the ineffective-assistance claims in the PCR action, and the State, through the attorney general's office, likewise controls the strategy in defending its employee's actions in this malpractice action. The district court concluded "the State of Iowa as named in the postconviction proceeding and the State of Iowa as named in the legal malpractice proceeding presently are identical."

The district court granted Clark's motion for partial summary judgment, finding the element of breach of duty for Clark's malpractice claim was conclusively established by the prior PCR ruling and leaving causation and damages to be decided by the jury.

We granted the State's application for interlocutory appeal and retained the appeal.

II. Standard of Review.

We review the district court's grant of partial summary judgment for errors at law. Emps. Mut. Cas. Co. v. Van Haaften , 815 N.W.2d 17, 22 (Iowa 2012). While we have reviewed application of issue preclusion in a particular case for an abuse of the district court's discretion, see Fischer v. City of Sioux City , 654 N.W.2d 544, 550 (Iowa 2002) (district court abused its discretion in allowing party to rely on issue preclusion not pleaded and first raised one week before trial); Casey v. Koos , 323 N.W.2d 193, 197 (Iowa 1982) (district court should decide in the first instance whether to apply offensive issue preclusion following completion of appeal process for prior proceeding), the determination of "[w]hether the elements of issue preclusion are satisfied is a question of law," Emps. Mut. Cas. Co. , 815 N.W.2d at 22 (quoting Grant v. Iowa Dep't of Human Servs. , 722 N.W.2d 169, 173 (Iowa 2006) ); see also Grant , 722 N.W.2d at 173 ("[W]e are not bound by the agency's decision [on whether issue preclusion elements were met], and may substitute our own interpretation of the law for the agency's.").

Here, the State challenges the district court's legal conclusions that the elements of issue preclusion were met and that mutuality was satisfied, so our review is for legal error. See Comes v. Microsoft Corp. , 709 N.W.2d 114, 117 (Iowa 2006) (reviewing for legal error a challenge to district court's application of incorrect legal standard related to issue preclusion); cf. Stender v. Blessum , 897 N.W.2d 491, 501 (Iowa 2017) (holding a district court necessarily abuses its discretion if it misapplies the law).

III. Analysis.

To recover for legal malpractice, Clark must prove:

(1) the existence of an attorney–client relationship between the defendant and plaintiff giving rise to a duty; (2) the attorney, by either an act or a failure to act, breached that duty; (3) this breach proximately caused injury to the plaintiff; and (4) the plaintiff sustained actual injury, loss, or damage.

Kraklio v. Simmons , 909 N.W.2d 427, 434 (Iowa 2018) (quoting Huber v. Watson , 568 N.W.2d 787, 790 (Iowa 1997) ). In Iowa, a criminal defendant is not required to prove actual innocence as a prerequisite to a legal malpractice claim against his former criminal attorney.³ See Barker v. Capotosto , 875 N.W.2d 157, 168 (Iowa 2016). The defendant is, however, required to obtain judicial relief related to the purported malpractice before pursuing a malpractice claim. See Kraklio , 909 N.W.2d at 439 (allowing defendant to bring...