UPDATES & ANALYSIS

Defendant should not have had to ‘bet the house’ to avoid prison, Iowa Supreme Court holds

by Rox Laird | March 18, 2026

Christopher Hidlebaugh accepted a financial challenge in a plea deal with the State: purchase a home to avoid going to prison on a charge of failing to register as a sex offender. The deal fell apart, however, when Hidlebaugh was unable to qualify for financing to purchase a home, and he was sentenced to 15 years in prison by the Dallas County District Court.

That, a divided Iowa Supreme Court held in a March 13 decision, violated Hidlebaugh’s equal protection and due process rights under the U.S. and Iowa constitutions. The opinion for the Court was written by Chief Justice Susan Christensen joined by Justices Edward Mansfield, Thomas Waterman and Matthew McDermott. Justice David May wrote a dissenting opinion joined by Justices Christopher McDonald and Dana Oxley.

“This case involves an unusual plea agreement where the defendant literally ‘bet the house,’” Chief Justice Christensen wrote.

Hidlebaugh agreed to plead guilty to a charge of failure to register as a sex offender as a habitual offender. In exchange, the State agreed to recommend that any prison sentence be suspended with probation provided that he purchase a home in Dallas County within 70 days. Hidlebaugh represented, and the State agreed, that having a permanent address by owning a home would help resolve his repeated failure to register as a sex offender.

Hidlebaugh was not able to obtain financing to purchase a home within 70 days, and although he pleaded for more time, the trial court sentenced him to 15 years in prison with a three-year mandatory minimum.

Hidlebaugh appealed, arguing that the district court considered an improper sentencing factor by penalizing him for being unable to afford a home, which violated his rights to equal protection and due process under the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and Article I, Section 6 of the Iowa Constitution.

The Iowa Supreme Court agreed.

Both the majority and the dissent focused on the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1983 decision in Bearden v. Georgia, which held that revoking a probation agreement when the defendant was unable to pay $500 under the agreement violated due process and equal protection. That decision quoted from an earlier opinion that said, “There can be no equal justice where the kind of trial a man gets depends on the amount of money he has.”

In Hidlebaugh’s case, the Iowa Supreme Court said, “we must determine whether Hidlebaugh received equal justice when his prison sentence may have resulted from his financial inability to purchase a home within a seventy-day period.”

Under Bearden, a sentencing court must determine whether the defendant’s failure to pay a financial obligation was willful, and if not the court must first consider alternatives before ordering a defendant to serve time in prison. A defendant’s willful failure to satisfy a financial obligation may be considered as an aggravating sentencing factor.

The Dallas County District Court said it was sentencing Hidlebaugh to prison because of his criminal history and because of the plea agreement. “Thus, it is clear that one of the two factors that led to Hidlebaugh’s prison sentence was his financial inability to contract to buy a home during the seventy-day period between plea and sentencing,” Chief Justice Christensen wrote.

That violated Hidlebaugh’s constitutional rights, the Court said, because he is entitled to be sentenced without consideration of an improper factor despite the fact that his criminal history was also considered.

“Finally, we emphasize what we are not addressing in this case,” Chief Justice Christensen wrote. “This case does not involve the imposition of restitution or fine, nor does it involve a defendant’s failure to pay victim restitution. We are simply holding that when the State and the defendant agree to recommend probation if the defendant meets a financial obligation by the time of sentencing, or prison if he doesn’t, the district court may not use that agreement to send the defendant to prison if the defendant demonstrates that, despite his best efforts, he could not meet that financial obligation.”

Writing in dissent, Justice May said the district court was authorized by statute to sentence Hidlebaugh to prison apart from consideration of the plea agreement, and he would have affirmed the sentence.

The trial court was not bound by the plea agreement between the State and Hidlebaugh, Justice May wrote. “No matter what the parties recommended, the court remained free to make its own independent determination as to what sentence was best in light of all of the relevant circumstances.”

Justice May also disagreed with the majority’s reading of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Bearden, which held that probation may not be revoked “solely” because of a probationer’s inability to pay a fine or restitution but that it could be revoked if the probationer failed to make sufficient efforts to do so. And he noted that the Bearden court used the word “solely” at least seven times in the ruling to emphasize that states may not automatically imprison exclusively based on financial shortcomings.

In Hidlebaugh’s case, the trial court considered, among other things, Hidlebaugh’s age, his employment circumstances, the pre-sentence investigation, the plea agreement, Hidlebaugh’s family circumstances, the nature of Hidlebaugh’s offense, and Hidlebaugh’s prior criminal record.

“And so Hidlebaugh’s sentencing was exactly what Bearden calls for,” Justice May wrote. “Hidlebaugh was not imprisoned automatically or ‘solely’ because of any one thing, much less a financial thing. Instead, his sentence was the product of a discretionary choice informed by the court’s consideration of a ‘wide range of factors,’ just as Bearden prescribed.”

Tags: Iowa Supreme Court 2025-26