Court Opinion

ID: 9368218
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-02-03 15:04:27.690148+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:16:06.180719
License: Public Domain

IN THE SUPREME COURT OF IOWA

                                  No. 21–0657

           Submitted September 15, 2022—Filed February 3, 2023

STATE OF IOWA,

      Appellee,

vs.

DEONTE WB ELLISON,

      Appellant.

      Appeal from the Iowa District Court for Dubuque County, Michael J.

Shubatt, Judge.

      A defendant appeals his conviction for voluntary manslaughter, arguing

that the district court committed reversible error in instructing the jury.

AFFIRMED.

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

joined.

      Martha J. Lucey, State Appellate Defender, and Shellie L. Knipfer (argued),

Assistant Appellate Defender, for appellant.

      Brenna Bird, Attorney General, and Darrel Mullins (argued), Assistant

Attorney General, for appellee.
                                        2

McDERMOTT, Justice.

      The State charged Deonte Ellison with first-degree murder after he shot

and killed Curtis Smothers in the midst of a fistfight they were having on a city

street in Dubuque. At trial, Ellison argued that he was justified in shooting

Smothers to put a stop to Smothers’s ongoing attack. The jury ultimately

acquitted Ellison of the murder charge but found him guilty of the lesser

included offense of voluntary manslaughter.

      Ellison argues in this appeal that the district court erroneously instructed

the jury on a “stand your ground” defense. Because he never actually raised a

stand-your-ground defense in the case, Ellison argues that the instruction

confused the jury about his actual justification defense. Ellison also argues that

another jury instruction—one that prevents a justification defense if the jury

finds that the defendant concealed or disguised physical evidence—in effect

compelled him to reveal evidence in violation of his constitutional right against

self-incrimination.

      I. Facts and Procedural History.

      The altercation between Ellison and Smothers was captured by a traffic

camera on July 2, 2020. The camera was positioned on a traffic signal pole above

a city street in Dubuque. The video, which was entered into evidence and played

for the jury, shows a car (driven by Ellison) pulling into a parallel parking spot

along the street around 6:00 p.m. A second car (driven by Ellison’s wife, Vanessa

Ellison) pulls into the spot behind Ellison’s car soon after. Several children

accompany Vanessa. The oldest of them, a daughter of about elementary school
                                        3

age, was borne of a prior relationship between Vanessa and Curtis Smothers.

Ellison and Vanessa have two younger children together.

      About a minute after Ellison parks his car, a white SUV containing

Smothers and two other men drives down the street, heading in the same

direction as Ellison and his wife had been before they parked. Vanessa and her

daughter had exited her car by this point, but Ellison remained in his car. The

white vehicle drives past the parked cars, but as it approaches an intersection

just past the cars, it pulls over too. One of the men in the vehicle testified that

Smothers recognized his daughter on the sidewalk and asked the driver to pull

over so he could get out and talk to her. After Smothers exits the vehicle, he

moves quickly down the sidewalk toward his daughter and then lifts her in the

air as they meet for an extended embrace.

      A no-contact order, based on Smothers’s prior physical abuse of Vanessa,

prohibited Smothers from making any contact with Vanessa or her family.

Vanessa testified that she’d not seen Smothers in perhaps a year before he

appeared on the sidewalk. Ellison was aware of Smothers’s past physical abuse

of Vanessa.

      Ellison, meanwhile, remains seated in the driver’s seat of his car, talking

to a man standing in the street who has appeared at his open car door. While

Smothers and the daughter continue their embrace, Ellison’s wife opens the

passenger doors of her car, removing bags and a child in a car seat.

      When Smothers ends his embrace with his daughter, he remains on the

sidewalk and appears to give a fist-bump greeting to one of the other children.
                                        4

Ellison, now out of his car, walks toward the sidewalk between his and Vanessa’s

parked cars. Witnesses testified that, at this point, Ellison and Smothers started

what would quickly turn into a heated exchange of words. Smothers, still

situated on the sidewalk, kicks off his sandals, appearing ready to fight. Ellison,

now also on the sidewalk, pushes Smothers away. The jawing continues. About

twelve seconds later, Ellison punches Smothers, Smothers punches back, and

fists fly.

       Over the next twenty seconds, Ellison and Smothers move around the

sidewalk in a full-on fistfight. According to one of the men with Smothers, at

some point during the fight, Ellison displayed (or even fired a warning shot from)

a handgun he’d pulled from his waistband, prompting Smothers to ask Ellison,

“Are you going to shoot me in front of my daughter?”

       Smothers appears to pursue Ellison toward the street, with Ellison moving

backwards into the space between the parallel-parked cars. Ellison stops and

pushes Smothers away. Smothers responds with another punch. Ellison then

draws a handgun from his waistband and fires. Smothers stumbles onto the

sidewalk and collapses, motionless. Everyone present quickly scatters, with the

exception of the two men who had arrived with Smothers in the white SUV.

Ellison and several of the others run across the street into a nearby house. One

of the men with Smothers calls 911 from his cell phone, and police officers arrive

within about a minute.
                                         5

      Everything just described—from the moment Ellison parked his car to the

moment police arrived—spanned less than five minutes. Smothers died of a

single gunshot wound to the chest.

      Several hours later, police executed a search warrant on the home across

the street that Ellison went into after the shooting. In the intervening period,

Ellison broke out a back window and left the area. Investigators pinged Ellison’s

cell phone, which lead to his apprehension on July 14 in Kalamazoo, Michigan

(the city in which Ellison resided). At trial, the jury was informed that

surveillance footage in Kalamazoo showed Ellison with a shaved head. The jury

was also informed through the testimony of multiple witnesses that police never

recovered the gun used in the shooting.

      Ellison was charged with first-degree murder (a class “A” felony), Iowa

Code § 707.2 (2020), and felon in possession of a firearm (a class “D” felony), id.

§ 724.26(1). He pleaded guilty to the felon-in-possession charge. After a trial, the

jury rejected the State’s first-degree murder charge and instead found Ellison

guilty of the lesser included offense of voluntary manslaughter (a class “C”

felony), id. § 707.4.

      II. Analysis of the Arguments.

      A. Did the district court err in giving an instruction on a
         stand-your-ground defense?

      A person is justified in using “reasonable force” against another if “the

person reasonably believes that such force is necessary to defend oneself or

another from any actual or imminent use of unlawful force.” Iowa Code § 704.3.

“Reasonable force,” in turn, is defined as “that force and no more which a
                                            6

reasonable person, in like circumstances, would judge to be necessary to prevent

an injury or loss.” Id. § 704.1(1). Deadly force is reasonable if the person

reasonably believes that deadly force “is necessary to avoid injury or risk to one’s

life or safety or the life or safety of another.” Id.

      The justification defense—the notion that one is justified and thus

shouldn’t be held criminally liable in using force in response to impending

harm—comes with several important caveats. As relevant here, the use of force

generally is not justified when the person knows that he can avoid the need to

use it with complete safety by retreating or taking an alternate course. See, e.g.,

State v. Lorenzo Baltazar, 935 N.W.2d 862, 870 (Iowa 2019). But in 2017, the

legislature added a caveat to this caveat with a new subsection stating that “[a]

person who is not engaged in illegal activity has no duty to retreat from any place

where the person is lawfully present before using force.” 2017 Iowa Acts ch. 69,

§ 37 (codified at Iowa Code § 704.1(3) (2018)). The new subsection, providing

what’s colloquially referred to as the right to “stand your ground,” modified the

usual requirement that a person in the face of a threat must retreat if possible

before resorting to force. The amended statute makes clear that people need not

retreat from a place where they are lawfully present and not “engaged in illegal

activity” before they resort to force. State v. Williams, 929 N.W.2d 621, 637 (Iowa

2019).
                                         7

      In light of the changes to the statute, the district court used a new jury

instruction. This Jury Instruction (Instruction 29)—which Ellison objected to—

stated:

            If any of the following is true, the defendant’s use of force was
      not justified:

            1. The defendant did not have a reasonable belief that it was
      necessary to use force to prevent an injury or loss.

            2. The defendant      used   unreasonable     force   under   the
      circumstances.

            3. The defendant was engaged in illegal activity in the place
      where he used force, he made no effort to retreat, and retreat was a
      reasonable alternative to using force.

           If the State has proved any of these beyond a reasonable
      doubt, the defendant’s use of force was not justified.

Subsection 3 of this instruction repackages the language in section 704.1(3) in

its negative form, instructing that the jury could not find that Ellison was

justified in using force if he was engaged in illegal activity and made no effort to

make a retreat when reasonable. See Iowa Code § 704.1(3).

      Ellison argues that this formulation confused the jury because it

suggested that his justification defense involved a claim to “stand his ground”

without retreating when in fact Ellison’s justification defense involved no such

claim. Ellison urges that the stand-your-ground defense isn’t pertinent to every

case in which a claim of justification arises and that the court’s instruction,

framed as it was, caused the jury to reject his defense merely because he couldn’t

establish the inapplicable elements of the stand-your-ground exception.
                                          8

      In State v. Lorenzo Baltazar, we observed that after the 2017 amendments,

a person lawfully present and not engaged in illegal activity had no duty to retreat

before using force. 935 N.W.2d at 870. But we went on to say that the new

language by implication continued to impose a duty to retreat if a person is

engaging in illegal activity or not lawfully present. Id. (“[T]he 2017 amendment

changed—but did not eliminate—the implied duty to follow an alternative course

of action.”). The usual duty to retreat generally still exists if a person is engaged

in illegal activity or has no right to be present. Id.

      The defendant in Lorenzo Baltazar claimed on appeal that he was entitled

to a stand-your-ground defense and argued that his lawyer provided ineffective

assistance by failing to request an instruction that included it. Id. at 871. We

held that since the defendant had been engaged in illegal activity at the time he

used deadly force, he wasn’t entitled to a stand-your-ground instruction, and we

thus rejected his ineffective assistance argument. Id. Yet this case presents

something of the inverse: Ellison claims to have raised no stand-your-ground

defense and argues that the district court erred in giving an instruction that

included it. As Ellison puts it, his “sole defense was that he acted with

justification because Smothers was the aggressor.”

      In reviewing alleged error in jury instructions, we determine as an initial

matter whether the instructions correctly state the law. State v. Schuler,

774 N.W.2d 294, 297 (Iowa 2009). Instruction 29 essentially restates, with minor

modification, the language of Iowa Code section 704.1(3), so its inclusion,

without more, contains no misstatement of the law. But even instructions that
                                        9

correctly state the law may not be given if they aren’t also “supported by

substantial evidence.” State v. Liggins, 557 N.W.2d 263, 267 (Iowa 1996). And

this seems to be the thrust of Ellison’s objection. “Requested instructions that

are not related to the factual issues to be decided by the jury should not be

submitted even though they may set out a correct statement of the law.” Vachon

v. Broadlawns Med. Found., 490 N.W.2d 820, 822 (Iowa 1992).

      The State argues that the instructions, including Instruction 29,

appropriately set forth Iowa’s justification law as applied to this case, which the

State had to overcome to meet its burden. It’s a settled point that when a

defendant raises a justification defense, the State has the burden to prove

beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant’s use of force was not justified.

State v. Shanahan, 712 N.W.2d 121, 134 (Iowa 2006). A defendant, the State

argues, can’t unilaterally relieve the State of its burden through omission in the

jury instructions.

      The formulation of Instruction 29 reflects the chapped structure of the

amended statutory text from which it derives. But its syntactical awkwardness

notwithstanding, it correctly stated the law and, most relevant here, addressed

factual issues that the jury needed to decide. The district court is under no

requirement “to give any particular form of an instruction; rather, the court must

merely give instructions that fairly state the law as applied to the facts of the

case.” State v. Marin, 788 N.W.2d 833, 838 (Iowa 2010), overruled on other

grounds by Alcala v. Marriott Int’l, Inc., 880 N.W.2d 699 (Iowa 2016).
                                                10

       Although Ellison claims not to have raised a stand-your-ground defense,

he never conceded that he was engaged in “illegal activity” when he shot

Smothers. Had the State failed to show that Ellison was engaged in illegal

activity, Ellison would have had the right to “stand his ground” and would have

had no duty to retreat. The State, in that situation, would have needed to prove

one of the other propositions in the instruction (subsection 1 or 2, quoted above)

to defeat Ellison’s justification defense.

       As a result, Ellison’s argument that a stand-your-ground defense wasn’t

in play—and thus that the stand-your-ground instruction was erroneously

given—must fail in this case. With the open question of whether Ellison was

“engaged in illegal activity,” a court’s failure to provide a stand-your-ground

instruction to the jury would have left unanswered whether the exception applied

and, along with it, whether the State had met its burden to rebut each element

of the justification defense. We thus reject Ellison’s argument that the district

court erred by including the stand-your-ground exception in the instructions.1

       Our finding of no error in this instruction notwithstanding, the

instructions would find improved clarity with a formulation that better reflects

       1This  does not mean that a defendant engaged in illegal conduct under Iowa Code section
704.1(3) is always denied the right to use force to defend himself in the face of an imminent
threat of unlawful force. Engaging in illegal activity does not, on its own, leave a person
defenseless to respond to unlawful force. The legislature in section 704.6 lays out the limited
circumstances in which a person will have no justification defense to an aggressor. See Iowa
Code § 704.6 (including, for instance, participating in a forcible felony or riot, provoking someone
to use force to trigger one’s own use of force in response, or provoking someone to use force by
one’s own unlawful acts and then responding with force). Section 704.1(3) provides that people
engaging in unspecified illegal activity simply may not “stand their ground” and use force in
response to a threat if a reasonable opportunity to retreat existed. See Lorenzo Baltazar,
935 N.W.2d at 870.
                                         11

that the duty to retreat remains an exception to the justification defense and that

the stand-your-ground defense is an exception to the duty to retreat. See, e.g.,

Model Penal Code § 3.04 (Am. L. Inst. 1985). A clearer formulation might help

jurors grasp that “stand your ground” is best understood as an exception to an

exception in a justification defense.

      B. Did including the term “illegal activity” in the instructions violate
         Ellison’s due process rights?

      Instruction 29 required the jury to determine whether Ellison was engaged

in “illegal activity” when he shot Smothers. Instruction 29 was followed by a

related instruction—Instruction 29A—that offered the jury a particular crime

that it might find to establish the illegal activity. Instruction 29A reads:

               With regard to element no. 3 of the previous two instructions,
      it is illegal for a person to go armed with any dangerous weapon with
      the intent to use that weapon against another person without
      justification. The defendant is not charged with this crime.

The term “illegal activity” comes straight from the section 704.1(3). Iowa Code

§ 704.1(3) (“A person who is not engaged in illegal activity has no duty to retreat

from any place where the person is lawfully present before using force.”). Ellison

argues the term as applied to him under these jury instructions is

unconstitutionally vague.

      Both the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution and

article I, section 9 of the Iowa Constitution forbid the taking of someone’s life,

liberty, or property without due process of law. State v. Newton, 929 N.W.2d 250,

255 (Iowa 2019). These due process guarantees are violated when, as alleged

here, a conviction arises out of “a criminal law so vague that it fails to give
                                        12

ordinary people fair notice of the conduct it punishes, or so standardless that it

invites arbitrary enforcement.” Johnson v. United States, 576 U.S. 591, 595

(2015).

      Ellison doesn’t suggest any difference in construction between the two

different constitutional due process guarantees. While we reserve the right to

apply even identically-worded provisions of the Federal and Iowa Constitutions

differently, Ellison hasn’t offered any argument that would counsel us to treat

them differently in this case, so we will apply the substantive federal due process

standard as we’ve done in other cases. See, e.g., Nguyen v. State, 878 N.W.2d

744, 755 (Iowa 2016).

      Ellison makes an “as applied” challenge to the statute, meaning that,

although there might be lawful applications of the statute to other people in other

circumstances, the law is unconstitutional as to him because of his particular

circumstances. See Bonilla v. Iowa Bd. of Parole, 930 N.W.2d 751, 764 (Iowa

2019). Ellison argues that the conduct used to establish the “illegal activity”

referred to in Instruction 29—going armed with intent to use a firearm without

justification—was “too intertwined” with the actions giving rise to the actual

murder charge, and that whatever might be offered to show illegal activity “must

be a wholly separate crime from the murder.” Permitting the jury to use a crime

with such a close connection to the actual murder charge, Ellison argues, gave

the term “illegal activity” too broad an application in violation of his due process

rights.
                                          13

      Ellison’s argument strikes from the exact opposite direction as the one

made by the defendant in Lorenzo Baltazar, 936 N.W.2d 862. In that case, the

defendant argued that “illegal activity” must be germane to the person’s use of

force—not wholly separate from it. Id. at 871. The defendant argued that his

possession of a handgun—the illegal activity recited to negate his claim to the

stand-your-ground exception—was irrelevant to his duty to retreat. Id. But we

determined that “[e]ven assuming the implied duty to retreat involves only illegal

activities germane to the use of force, Baltazar’s possession of the handgun was

directly related to the shooting death.” Id. We thus held that Baltazar had

engaged in an illegal activity under section 704.1(3), and that it disqualified him

from the stand-your-ground exception. Id.

      How connected, or disconnected, must the “illegal activity” be to the

homicide charge? We don’t need to decide all the contours or permutations of

that question in this case. Ellison brings his claim that the “illegal activity” is too

connected in the form of an as-applied challenge. So we only need to answer

whether the crime of going armed with intent (from Instruction 29A) is

insufficiently separate to constitute the “illegal activity” in this case. Going armed

with intent requires possession of a dangerous weapon with specific intent to

use it against another person and movement from one place to another. See Iowa

Code § 708.8; State v. Harris, 891 N.W.2d 182, 186 (Iowa 2017); State v. Pearson,

804 N.W.2d 260, 265 n.1 (Iowa 2011) (collecting cases). The jury could consider

this potential form of “illegal activity” to negate a stand-your-ground defense. As

applied to the facts of Ellison’s case, we do not find that Instruction 29A’s
                                           14

instruction on the going-armed-with-intent crime creates an unconstitutionally

vague application of “illegal activity.”

      Although we reject Ellison’s vagueness challenge to the term “illegal

activity,” we believe that the instructions could have been more clearly stated by

not including the term “illegal activity” at all. The court instead might simply

have offered the elements of the State’s proposed illegal activity, tying that

finding directly to the viability of the stand-your-ground exception, without

leaving the jury to supply its own definition of “illegal activity” and to consider

whether the conduct met this definition.

      C. Did the district court’s instruction that the jury consider whether
         Ellison fulfilled “a duty not to intentionally destroy, alter, conceal,
         or disguise” evidence violate Ellison’s constitutional right against
         self-incrimination?

      The Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution states that “[n]o

person . . . shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against

himself.” The Amendment’s protection against compulsory self-incrimination

applies to the states under the Fourteenth Amendment. See Malloy v. Hogan,

378 U.S. 1, 2–6 (1964). The Iowa Constitution doesn’t contain language that

directly tracks the Fifth Amendment’s language. See State v. Gibbs, 941 N.W.2d

888, 894 (Iowa 2020). Still, we’ve held that the due process clause in article I,

section 9 of the Iowa Constitution provides a corresponding protection against

compulsory self-incrimination. Id.; State v. Iowa Dist. Ct., 801 N.W.2d 513, 518

n.2 (Iowa 2011). But much like his due process claim, Ellison doesn’t suggest

any difference in construction between the two different constitutional

guarantees and doesn’t offer any argument suggesting that we analyze them
                                         15

differently in this case. We thus will analyze this issue under the Fifth

Amendment. See, e.g., Nguyen, 878 N.W.2d at 755.

      The handgun Ellison used to shoot Smothers was never recovered and

thus never presented as evidence at trial. Instruction 32 informed the jury about

the duty associated with the disposition of physical evidence when a person uses

deadly force. It stated:

             After using deadly force, the defendant had the duty to not
      intentionally destroy, alter, conceal, or disguise physical evidence
      relating to the defendant’s use of deadly force. You may consider
      whether the defendant complied with this duty when you decide
      whether deadly force was justified.

This instruction echoed the statutory language of section 704.2B(2), which

states:

      The person using deadly force shall not intentionally destroy, alter,
      conceal, or disguise physical evidence relating to the person’s use of
      deadly force, and the person shall not intentionally intimidate
      witnesses into refusing to cooperate with any investigation relating
      to the use of such deadly force or induce another person to alter
      testimony about the use of such deadly force.

Iowa Code § 704.2B(2).

      Ellison   argues     that   Instruction   32   violated   his   right   against

self-incrimination under both the Federal and Iowa Constitutions by requiring a

“testimonial” act and thus penalizing his silence. In State v. Gibbs, we addressed

an as-applied challenge involving another subsection of this statute, section

704.2B(1), to determine whether a jury instruction restating its statutory

language improperly penalized silence. 941 N.W.2d at 897. Subsection 1 states:

      If a person uses deadly force, the person shall notify or cause
      another to notify a law enforcement agency about the person’s use
      of deadly force within a reasonable time period after the person’s use
                                       16

      of the deadly force, if the person or another person is capable of
      providing such notification.

Id. § 704.2B(1). We held that the jury instruction paraphrasing subsection 1

improperly penalized the defendant’s exercise of the constitutional right to

remain silent by “authorizing an inference of guilt in a murder case because the

defendant breached a legal duty to make a report to authorities.” Gibbs,

941 N.W.2d at 897.

      Subsection 1 includes language that imposes a duty to communicate—

“the person shall notify or cause another to notify a law enforcement agency”—

that doesn’t similarly appear in subsection 2. Compare Iowa Code § 704.2B(1),

with id. § 704.2B(2). We held that this duty to communicate, as incorporated

into the jury instructions in Gibbs, imposed an unconstitutional penalty against

the defendant “for failing to affirmatively seek out the authorities and speak to

them prearrest—with no Fifth Amendment exception.” Gibbs, 941 N.W.2d at 898.

      In reaching our holding in Gibbs, we did not consider—and did not

decide—whether the separate duties about the treatment of physical evidence in

section 704.2B(2) violated constitutional protections. Id. at 897 n.2. The State

argues that, in this case, the duty from subsection 2 incorporated into

Instruction 32 to “not intentionally destroy, alter, conceal, or disguise physical

evidence” does not compel any communication by the defendant that could be

considered “testimonial” in nature but instead imposes duties only on mere

conduct relating to physical evidence. Since the required evidence-preserving

conduct doesn’t constitute testimonial communication, argues the State, no

Fifth Amendment problem exists.
                                        17

      None of the verbs at issue—“destroy, alter, conceal, or disguise”—were

defined in the jury instructions. (Nor are they defined anywhere in Iowa Code

chapter 704.) But words used in a jury instruction “need not be defined if they

are of ordinary usage and are generally understood.” State v. Weiss, 528 N.W.2d

519, 520 (Iowa 1995) (per curiam). None of the words listed in Instruction 32

strike us as beyond the lexicon of a reasonable juror.

      Ellison suggests that a person reasonably might conclude that a “duty not

to intentionally destroy, alter, conceal or disguise” implies some affirmative duty

to reveal or to disclose incriminating evidence. He urges that requiring a person

to disclose evidence of their own involvement in a potential criminal act to law

enforcement risks loss of the justification defense itself, if the person fails to

disclose evidence. But this dilemma raises Fifth Amendment concerns nearly

identical to those we uncovered in Gibbs, 941 N.W.2d at 898.

      The State argues that “the right to silence does not apply to physical

evidence,” and in support of this assertion, it cites a number of cases that require

the defendant to produce, for instance, blood samples, handwriting exemplars,

voice exemplars, tax documents, and other types of business documents. See

State v. Decker, 744 N.W.2d 346, 355 (Iowa 2008) (providing a similar list of

“nontestimonial evidence”). But this argument doesn’t address testimonial

features that often accompany a person’s disclosure of physical evidence. The

Fifth Amendment’s protections extend not only to government coercion of direct

testimony but also to penalties the government imposes against the accused that
                                        18

have the effect of depriving people of the right to remain silent. Gibbs, 941 N.W.2d

at 894).

      In Doe v. United States, the United States Supreme Court explained how it

has historically interpreted the privilege against testimonial communications

where a defendant is required to produce incriminating documents. 487 U.S.

201, 208–09 (1988) (citing United States v. Doe, 465 U.S. 605 (1984), and Fisher

v. United States, 425 U.S. 391 (1976)). The Court reiterated that the act of

producing evidence to the government “could constitute protected testimonial

communication because it might entail implicit statements of fact.” Id.; see also

Decker, 744 N.W.2d at 354. As to producing subpoenaed documents, for

example, the act itself is “testimonial” since “the witness would admit that the

papers existed, were in his possession or control, and were authentic.” Doe,

487 U.S. at 208. The Supreme Court has “made clear that the Fifth Amendment

privilege against self-incrimination applies to acts”—in other words, conduct—

“that imply assertions of fact.” Id.

      But the “duty not to intentionally destroy, alter, conceal, or disguise

physical evidence” does not imply, in our view, any assertion of fact necessary to

trigger Fifth Amendment concerns. Applying the ordinary meanings of these

words, the operative verbs impose no affirmative duty to disclose evidence to law

enforcement or anyone else. And if there’s no duty to disclose evidence—no

communication required of the defendant to fulfill the duty—then there’s no

testimonial communication in violation of Ellison’s Fifth Amendment privilege to

run with it. As a result, we find that Ellison suffered no violation of his Fifth
                                              19

Amendment rights, as applied to the states under the Fourteenth Amendment,

when the district court gave a jury instruction paraphrasing section 704.2B(2).2

       III. Conclusion.

       Finding no instructional error or constitutional violation, we affirm

Ellison’s conviction and sentence.

       AFFIRMED.

       2In Gibbs, we described concerns about a section 704.2B(1) instruction, 941 N.W.2d at
894–900, that might apply equally to subsection 2 in this case—in particular, the vague
permission in Instruction 32 that the jury “may consider whether the defendant complied with
this duty when you decide whether deadly force was justified.” How, exactly, the jury should
“consider” the failed duty is never explained. In Gibbs, we concluded that “there can only be one
answer—so the jury holds it against the defendant in some significant but indeterminate way.”
Id. at 899. Yet whatever misgivings we might continue to harbor about these section 704.2B
instructions, Ellison never raised—either in the district court or on appeal—any objection to the
instruction on any basis other than Fifth Amendment grounds. We decline to take up different
potential arguments about the instruction that were neither raised nor ruled on in the district
court. State v. Mitchell, 757 N.W.2d 431, 435 (Iowa 2008).