UPDATES & ANALYSIS

Iowa Supreme Court to hear oral argument about the presumption of innocence October 2 in Iowa City

by Samuel Province | September 30, 2026

State v. Wiggins, Scheduled for oral argument on October 2 at 1:30 PM.

Question: Is it inherently prejudicial to have a uniformed sheriff’s deputy stand next to the witness box while the defendant testifies?

James Wiggins was found guilty of second-degree murder in connection with an incident where he shot at Tyrone Hutchins outside a bar in Des Moines in December 2022. When giving his testimony, Wiggins stated that he had been acting in self-defense since Hutchins had pointed a gun at Wiggins’s brother and friend before aiming it at Wiggins himself. A deputy sat near the witness box while Wiggins testified, as is required by Polk County courthouse policy, but no deputy was present while the State’s witnesses testified.

The Iowa Court of Appeals set aside Wiggins’s conviction and ordered a new trial. The court of appeals reasoned that the deputy’s presence was prejudicial, weakened the presumption of innocence, and constituted an error which could not be regarded as harmless, particularly as Wiggins’s credibility was vital to his self-defense claim. The court of appeals relied upon the Iowa Supreme Court’s 1987 ruling in State v. Wilson and said that security measures had to be justified on a basis “particularized to the defendant” rather than on the grounds of general policy.

On further review, the State contends that the court of appeals’ decision is in conflict with Holbrook v. Flynn, a 1986 opinion in which the U.S. Supreme Court stated that the presence of officers is not automatically prejudicial. It argues that no other court has held this practice to be inherently prejudicial and that the deputy maintained the same distance from Wiggins throughout the trial. Furthermore, the panel relied on the dissenting opinion rather than the majority opinion from a California case. The State claims that this resulted in two mistakes: the removal of the requirement that Wiggins have to prove actual prejudice and the substitution of the constitutional harmless-error standard with a less strict, non-constitutional one. It also maintains that any error was harmless because of the strong video evidence, the jury instruction telling the jury to disregard Wiggins’s custodial status, Wiggins himself mentioning his custodial status, and the jury returning a second-degree rather than a first-degree murder verdict.

Two of Wiggins’s arguments remain unresolved. The first of these is his objection to the jury instruction on “malice,” even though the district court refused to give that instruction. The second is his claim that mandatory participation in a victim-offender dialogue amounted to an illegal sentence.

Tags: Iowa Supreme Court 2025-26