Connor James Gibbs v. State of Iowa

IN THE COURT OF APPEALS OF IOWA

No. 24-0222
Filed June 18, 2025

CONNOR JAMES GIBBS,
Applicant-Appellant,

vs.

STATE OF IOWA,
Respondent-Appellee.
________________________________________________________________

Appeal from the Iowa District Court for Howard County, Laura Parrish,

Judge.

An applicant appeals a district court ruling that dismissed his application for

postconviction relief as time-barred. AFFIRMED.

Denise M. Gonyea of McKelvie Law Office, for appellant.

Brenna Bird, Attorney General, and Timothy M. Hau, Assistant Attorney

General, for appellee State.

Considered without oral argument by Schumacher, P.J., and Badding and

Chicchelly, JJ.
2

BADDING, Judge.

Connor Gibbs appeals a district court ruling that dismissed his application

for postconviction relief as time-barred under Iowa Code section 822.3 (2021). He

claims that the court erred in dismissing his application because he met the

“ground of fact” exception to the statute of limitations and is entitled to a hearing

on the merits. We affirm.

I. Background Facts and Proceedings

In April 2017, Connor Gibbs pled guilty to sexual abuse in the third degree

in violation of Iowa Code section 709.4(1)(b)(3)(d) (2016).1 He received a deferred

judgment and was placed on probation. In his written guilty plea, Gibbs admitted

“that on or about the 16th day of September, 2015, in Howard County, Iowa, I did

have sexual relations with a 14 or 15 year old and I was four or more years older

than the minor child.” He also agreed that the district court could rely on the

minutes of testimony as a further factual basis for the plea.

After multiple probation violations—which included contact with minor

children—the district court revoked Gibbs’s deferred judgment in February 2018

and sentenced him to prison for an indeterminate term of ten years. Gibbs did not

file a direct appeal. Instead, in August 2021, Gibbs applied for postconviction

relief. Among other grounds for relief, Gibbs alleged that the State committed a

Brady2 violation by “failing to produce that this alleged victim had multiple other

1 This same provision is now found in Iowa Code section 709.4(1)(b)(2)(d).
2 Brady v. Maryland, 373 U.S. 83, 87 (1963) (“[T]he suppression by the prosecution

of evidence favorable to an accused upon request violates due process where the
evidence is material either to guilt or to punishment, irrespective of the good faith
or bad faith of the prosecution.”).
3

arrangements with other men.” According to Gibbs, through his own diligence, he

“found another person who provided an affidavit of [the victim’s] sexual actions,”

which he contended would show her “carousing nature.”

The affidavit, from a man named Dustin Ruggeberg, was attached to

Gibbs’s petition and stated:

I met [the victim] through my friend . . . in high school. She is
a girl that likes to mess around with older men. I dated her for one
year after [my friend] and her broke up the month before in
September of 2015. She was 14 and I was 16 when I dated her that
summer. She like[d] to drink, smoke, and flirt at part[ies] with
everyone. She makes sexual gestures and advances on the men at
these part[ies]. She also did these gestures and advances to my
friends and I in high school in 2017 right before I graduated. She
also writes and text[s] sexual messages to a lot of older men from
her and my hometown.

The State moved to dismiss Gibbs’s application in January 2024 alleging,

in part, that it was time-barred under Iowa Code section 822.3 (2021). At a hearing

on the motion, Gibbs conceded that his application was filed outside the applicable

limitations period. But he argued that Ruggeberg’s affidavit fell within the statutory

exception for “a ground of fact or law that could not have been raised within the

applicable time period.” The State disagreed, arguing the affidavit was “not new

evidence that would be substantial here” because of “the rape shield protection for

victims.” See Iowa R. Evid. 5.412.

Following the hearing, the district court preliminarily ruled that Gibbs had

failed to show a nexus between the affidavit and his conviction. The court

reasoned:

Rule of Evidence 5.412 specifically prohibits evidence offered to
prove that a victim engaged in other sexual behavior or evidence
offered to prove a victim’s sexual predisposition. . . . A minor child
cannot consent to a sex act with an adult. Any evidence of the minor
4

victim’s sexual behavior or sexual predisposition would not be
relevant and, even if this Court were to determine Gibbs could not
have discovered these facts within the three-year time period, he
cannot demonstrate a nexus to qualify for the exception under
Section 822.3. Therefore, summary dismissal of his application is
appropriate.

The court gave Gibbs twenty days to reply to its proposed dismissal. Gibbs

did so, arguing “Ruggeberg’s statements regarding S.E.’s conduct and his

comments about the quality of S.E.’s character are certainly paramount to

impeaching S.E.’s credibility.”3 After reviewing the reply, the court confirmed its

earlier ruling and dismissed Gibbs’s postconviction-relief application.

Gibbs appeals.

II. Standard of Review

We review the district court’s summary disposition of a postconviction-relief

application for correction of errors at law. Schmidt v. State, 909 N.W.2d 778, 784

(Iowa 2018). In doing so, we apply the summary judgment standards to the statute

of limitations issue, with the burden on the State as the moving party to show the

absence of a genuine issue of material facts. Moon v. State, 911 N.W.2d 137, 143

(Iowa 2018).

III. Analysis

Iowa Code section 822.3 requires postconviction-relief applications to “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.” Gibbs

3 In support of this argument, Gibbs contended S.E. “created and utilized a fake

social media profile under a fake name and displaying her age to be 18.” But
mistake of fact is not a defense to Gibbs’s crime. See State v. Tague, 310 N.W.2d
209, 212 (Iowa 1981). In any event, Gibbs does not repeat this argument on
appeal, so we do not consider it further.
5

acknowledges that his application was not filed within that deadline, relying instead

on the statute’s exception to its limitation period: “However, this limitation does not

apply to a ground of fact or law that could not have been raised within the

applicable time period.” Iowa Code § 822.3.

For this exception to apply, there must be a nexus between the asserted

ground of fact and the challenged conviction. Harrington v. State, 659 N.W.2d

509, 520 (Iowa 2003). “This additional requirement is based on the common sense

conclusion that it would be absurd to toll the statute of limitations pending the

discovery of a trivial fact that could not possibly affect the challenged conviction.”

Id. An exonerating ground of fact must therefore be relevant to that conviction. Id.

at 521. “By ‘relevant’ we mean the ground of fact must be of the type that has the

potential to qualify as material evidence for the purposes of a substantive claim

under section 822.2.” Id.

On appeal, Gibbs reprises his argument that the affidavit satisfies the nexus

requirement because it “indicates that the victim engaged in a pattern of behavior

that would bring into question whether her allegations against Gibbs were true.” In

other words, Gibbs contends the affidavit about the victim is relevant as

impeachment evidence. While impeachment evidence is not automatically

excluded from the potentially material evidence category, see Moon, 911 N.W.2d

at 144, this evidence was not impeaching.

We start by addressing an undercurrent of Gibbs’s argument—that because

Ruggeberg observed that the victim “like[d] to mess around with older men” and

make “sexual advances and gestures,” she did the same thing with Gibbs. But, as

the district court found, consent was not at issue here. Because S.E. was fifteen
6

years old and Gibbs was more than four years older, she could not consent to any

sex act with him. See Iowa Code § 709.4(1)(b)(3)(d) (2016); see also State v.

Willet, 305 N.W.2d 454, 456 (Iowa 1981) (explaining in a statutory rape case

“whether force or a lack of consent is present is immaterial”); State v. Thorne,

No. 16-0355, 2016 WL 6396020, at *2 (Iowa Ct. App. Oct. 26, 2016).

Moreover, for at least the past half century, our supreme court has rejected

the idea “that a victim’s consent to intercourse with one man implies her consent

in the case of another.” State v. Ball, 262 N.W.2d 278, 280 (Iowa 1978); accord

State v. Kraker, 494 N.W.2d 687, 689 (Iowa 1993) (“Consent to a sex act with one

person does not imply consent to a sex act with another person.”). That principle

is embodied in Iowa’s rape-shield rule—Iowa Rule of Evidence 5.412—which

“generally prohibits evidence of specific instances of a victim’s ‘other sexual

behavior.’”4 State v. Montgomery, 966 N.W.2d 641, 653 (Iowa 2021) (quoting Iowa

R. Evid. 5.412)). Gibbs does not contend that the affidavit meets any of the

exceptions to this general prohibition, see Donahue, 951 N.W.2d at 8, or otherwise

explain the nexus between the affidavit and his conviction.

Simply put, Ruggeberg’s statements about S.E.’s other sexual acts or

general reputation—even assuming they were true—are not “of the type that has

the potential to qualify as material evidence for the purposes of a substantive claim

under section 822.2” and could not possibly affect his conviction for third-degree

sexual abuse under Iowa Code section 709.4(1)(b)(3)(d). Harrington, 659 N.W.2d

4 Although false allegations of other sexual abuse are not protected under the rule,

see State v. Donahue, 951 N.W.2d 1, 8 (Iowa 2021), Ruggeberg’s affidavit does
not provide new evidence of prior false allegations by S.E.
7

at 520; see also Garcia v. State, No. 23-1246, 2025 WL 52831, at *2 (Iowa Ct.

App. Jan. 9, 2025) (concluding a postconviction-relief applicant failed to meet the

nexus requirement where the asserted new ground of fact was inadmissible and

irrelevant). We accordingly agree with the district court that the nexus between

the asserted ground of fact and challenged conviction was absent.

The court’s ruling on this issue properly applied the ground-of-fact test set

out in Harrington and Moon and was not a ruling on the merits, as Gibbs contends

on appeal. See Moon, 911 N.W.2d at 143 (distinguishing between the ground-of-

fact exception in section 822.3 and a substantive claim based on newly discovered

evidence under Iowa Code section 822.2(1)(d)). And the fact that Gibbs alleges a

Brady violation doesn’t exempt his petition from the statute of limitations. See

Harrington, 659 N.W.2d at 520–21 (applying the test for the ground-of-fact

exception in section 822.3 to determine timeliness before reaching the merits of

an alleged Brady violation).

We also reject Gibbs’s broad contention that his ineffective assistance of

counsel claims entitled him to an evidentiary hearing on the merits. The time-bar

in section 822.3 does not contain a separate exception for ineffective-assistance

claims, which must still pass the ground-of-fact test. See Cornell v. State, 529

N.W.2d 606, 612 (Iowa 1994). Gibbs’s application for postconviction relief raised

several such claims, and he does not specify which—if any—would satisfy that

test. We will not make that argument for him. See Hyler v. Garner, 548 N.W.2d

864, 876 (Iowa 1996) (“[W]e will not speculate on the arguments [a party] might

have made and then search for legal authority and comb the record for facts to

support such arguments.”).
8

For these reasons, we affirm the district court’s dismissal of Gibbs’s

postconviction-relief application as time-barred under section 822.3

AFFIRMED.