State of Iowa v. Clyde E. Squires ( 2016 )

IN THE COURT OF APPEALS OF IOWA
No. 15-1532
Filed June 29, 2016
STATE OF IOWA,
Plaintiff-Appellee,
vs.
CLYDE E. SQUIRES,
Defendant-Appellant.
________________________________________________________________
Appeal from the Iowa District Court for Jackson County, Joel W. Barrows
(plea) and Thomas G. Reidel (sentencing), Judges.
Clyde Squires appeals his sentence and claims he received ineffective
assistance of counsel. AFFIRMED.
Stuart G. Hoover of Blair & Fitzsimmons, P.C., Dubuque, for appellant.
Thomas J. Miller, Attorney General, and Mary A. Triick, Assistant Attorney
General, for appellee.
Considered by Danilson, C.J., and Vaitheswaran and Tabor, JJ.
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VAITHESWARAN, Judge.
Clyde Squires pled guilty to conspiracy to manufacture methamphetamine
and gathering where controlled substances are unlawfully used. The district
court sentenced him to concurrent prison terms not exceeding ten and five years,
respectively. On appeal, Squires contends the district court abused its discretion
in sentencing him to prison rather than granting him a suspended sentence. He
also contends his attorney was ineffective in allowing him “to enter a plea of
guilty after being improperly influenced regarding the likely outcome of
sentencing which rendered [his] plea unknowing and involuntary.”
The district court gave the following reasons for imposing prison time:
Mr. Squires, there’s good and bad in your life. . . . You’ve had a
problem with alcohol, as your attorney outlined, that led to prior
felony convictions. You did seem to have a long gap though from
approximately 1997 to 2015 with no criminal convictions. [T]here’s
a history of you not being successful in community-based services,
having had your probation revoked twice—revoked once and then
violating your probation two additional times, actually. You were
cooperative with the PSI.
....
I’ve given serious consideration to your request for probation
and have considered the long gap you had from 1997 to 2015, but
ultimately, I believe that the best way to maximize your
rehabilitation is . . . with a term of incarceration. I believe that will
allow you to get the treatment you need in a manner that will
prevent relapse or temptation, and I believe it will also deter others
in the future from similar conduct. I consider the nature of the
offense[s], . . . and the fact that you . . . placed other members of
the community at risk by exposure to these drugs. The Court finds,
for those reasons, that incarceration is appropriate in this case.
We discern no abuse of discretion in this statement of reasons. See State v.
Formaro, 638 N.W.2d 720, 724 (Iowa 2002) (“We will not reverse the decision of
the district court absent an abuse of discretion or some defect in the sentencing
procedure.”).
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We turn to Squires’ ineffective-assistance-of-counsel claim. Squires
argues his attorney, the sheriff, and a jailer told him he would receive a
suspended sentence and these representations “improperly influenced [him] to
enter a plea of guilty.” See State v. Whitehead, 163 N.W.2d 899, 902 (Iowa
1969) (“A guilty plea, if induced by promises or threats which deprive it of the
character of a voluntary act, is void.”). In his view, his attorney was ineffective in
allowing him to plead guilty under these circumstances.
Generally, we preserve this type of claim for postconviction relief to allow
counsel the opportunity to weigh in. See State v. Thorndike, 860 N.W.2d 316,
319 (Iowa 2015). We do so here.
We affirm Squires’ judgment and sentence and preserve his ineffective-
assistance-of-counsel claim for postconviction relief.
AFFIRMED.