Rickie Rilea v. State of Iowa, Iowa Department of Transportation, David Lorenzen, in His Official Capacity of Director of the Iowa Department of Transportation Motor Vehicle Enforcement Division, Mark Lowe, in His Official Capacity as the Director of the Iowa Department

IN THE SUPREME COURT OF IOWA
No. 20–0710
Submitted March 23, 2021—Filed May 14, 2021
RICKIE RILEA,
Appellant,
vs.
STATE OF IOWA, IOWA DEPARTMENT OF TRANSPORTATION, DAVID
LORENZEN, in his Official Capacity of Director of the Iowa Department of
Transportation Motor Vehicle Enforcement Division, MARK LOWE, in his
Official Capacity as the Director of the Iowa Department of Transportation
Motor Vehicle Division, and PAUL TROMBINO III, in his Official Capacity
as Director of the Iowa Department of Transportation,
Appellees.
Appeal from the Iowa District Court for Polk County, David Nelmark,
Judge.
The plaintiff appeals the district court’s grant of summary judgment
dismissing his unjust enrichment claims. AFFIRMED.
McDermott, J., delivered the opinion of the court, in which all
justices joined.
Brandon Brown and Jessica Donels of Parrish Kruidenier Dunn
Gentry Brown Bergmann & Messamer L.L.P., Des Moines, for appellant.
Thomas J. Miller, Attorney General, David S. Gorham, Special
Assistant Attorney General, and Robin G. Formaker, Assistant Attorney
General, for appellees.
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McDERMOTT, Justice.
In 2016, Rickie Rilea received a ticket for speeding in a construction
zone issued by an Iowa Department of Transportation (IDOT) Motor Vehicle
Enforcement officer. He pleaded guilty to the charge and paid the $465
associated fine. He later filed a lawsuit challenging the legal authority of
IDOT officers to issue traffic citations. On appeal of that issue, we held
that IDOT officers at the time lacked authority to stop vehicles and issue
citations for offenses unrelated to operating authority, registration, size,
weight, and load. Rilea v. Iowa Dep’t of Transp., 919 N.W.2d 380 (Iowa
2018).
In the same lawsuit, Rilea sued the State of Iowa, the IDOT, and
several individual IDOT officials contesting the payments the State
collected (prior to a law change in May 2017) from fines resulting from
convictions on unauthorized IDOT-issued citations. In this aspect of his
case now before us, Rilea contends that the defendants improperly reaped
the benefit of fines from these tickets, and that he and others like him
should have their payments returned to them. His petition includes a
request to certify the matter for class-action relief to address the
thousands of citations that IDOT officers issued without authority for
decades. In this count of his lawsuit, he pleads his cause of action against
the defendants as one of unjust enrichment.
The defendants moved for summary judgment, arguing that (1) they
were entitled to sovereign immunity, (2) the defendants were not unjustly
enriched, and (3) Rilea’s claim was barred as an improper collateral attack
on his speeding ticket conviction. The district court resolved the first issue
in Rilea’s favor, holding that sovereign immunity didn’t apply. On the
second issue, it held as a matter of law that no claim for unjust enrichment
could lie against any defendants except the State of Iowa. And on the third
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issue, the district court held that the unjust enrichment claim was indeed
an improper collateral attack on Rilea’s conviction, thus warranting
dismissal of Rilea’s lawsuit.
Rilea appeals, challenging only the third issue—whether his unjust
enrichment claim is an improper collateral attack on his speeding ticket
conviction. We review rulings on motions for summary judgment to correct
legal error. Pitts v. Farm Bureau Life Ins., 818 N.W.2d 91, 96 (Iowa 2012).
We’re confronted with a purely legal question; the material facts of the case
are straightforward and undisputed.
Unjust enrichment is a doctrine of restitution. Smith v. Harrison,
325 N.W.2d 92, 94 (Iowa 1982). It requires a plaintiff to prove the
defendant received a benefit at the expense of the plaintiff under
circumstances that make it unjust for the defendant to retain the benefit.
Endress v. Iowa Dep’t of Hum. Servs., 944 N.W.2d 71, 80 (Iowa 2020). The
circumstances giving rise to an unjust enrichment cause of action might
more appropriately be labeled “unjustified enrichment” seeing as our focus
centers on whether there has been a “transfer of a benefit without
adequate legal ground.” Restatement (Third) of Restitution & Unjust
Enrichment § 1 cmt. b at 6 (Am. L. Inst. 2011). In this case, Rilea’s unjust
enrichment claim seeks to disgorge from the State an acquired benefit
(money) based on the State’s alleged wrongful interference with Rilea’s
rights (a fine arising from an unlawful IDOT-issued ticket). See Id. § 3, at
22 (“A person is not permitted to profit by his own wrong.”). Because a
plaintiff must show that the circumstances make it “unjust” for the
defendant to retain the benefit, the circumstances in which the claim
arises often determine whether the law will treat the particular enrichment
as “unjust” for purposes of imposing liability.
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The circumstances of Rilea’s unjust enrichment claim for the return
of his criminal fine payment arises in the context of a criminal prosecution
and, more particularly, a criminal conviction. Rilea’s guilty plea to the
speeding charge gave rise to the associated fine. Rilea paid the fine borne
of his conviction.
Rilea is entitled to the return of money he paid if what he paid
belonged to him and not to the State. Smith, 325 N.W.2d at 94. But the
money Riley paid was owed to the State as court debt because Rilea was
adjudicated guilty in state district court. Iowa Code § 602.8107(1)(a)
(2016) (defining “court debt” to include fines, penalties, court costs, and
surcharges). And court debt is “owed and payable to the clerk of the
district court.” Id. § 602.8107(2). The fine is separate from the underlying
citation. The payment Rilea made was a product of a court’s adjudication.
In Smith v. Harrison, we analyzed an unjust enrichment claim in
circumstances where a tenant (Harrison) received benefits from a
discounted rental rate on a farm lease with a landlord who shortly
thereafter became the ward in a conservatorship. 325 N.W.2d at 94. We
said:
Any benefits received by Harrison were received pursuant to
the lease. It was not unjust for him to receive them unless the
lease should be set aside. Thus a ground for invalidating the
lease must be established before a basis for restitution exists.
Id. (emphasis added). We found no ground to invalidate the lease and,
thus, found no liability under an unjust enrichment theory.
Rilea doesn’t claim a speeding conviction didn’t occur; the court
made an adjudication that Rilea committed the crime. Rilea, in this very
case, has admitted again that he committed the charged traffic offense.
The fact has been indisputably established. The State, in receiving
payment of Rilea’s fine, was “only doing what it was entitled to do based
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on a final and firm judgment.” Slade v. M.L.E. Inv. Co., 566 N.W.2d 503,
506 (Iowa 1997) (finding no liability under an unjust enrichment theory).
As the district court correctly held, the State’s retention of Rilea’s
payment of the fine would only become unlawful if the underlying
conviction were overturned. Rilea concedes, as he must, that a conviction
by a court of competent jurisdiction ordinarily isn’t subject to collateral
attack except through a postconviction relief challenge under the
procedures in Iowa Code chapter 822. Rilea’s conviction has never been
challenged, let alone overturned. By now, any motions he might file in his
criminal case would be untimely, and even the three-year statutory period
to file an application for postconviction relief has expired. See Iowa Code
§ 822.3.
A collateral attack is an attempt to impeach a judgment before a
court other than the one that rendered it, in an action other than the one
in which it was rendered, in “an attempt to avoid, defeat, or evade it, or
deny its force and effect, in some incidental proceeding not provided by
law for the express purpose of attacking it.” Fetters v. Degnan, 250 N.W.2d
25, 30 (Iowa 1977) (quoting 49 C.J.S. Judgments § 408) (upholding the
revocation of a defendant’s driving privileges following the defendant’s
improper collateral attack on his operating-while-intoxicated judgment).
Rilea’s unjust enrichment claim launches no attack on, and thus leaves
intact, the criminal conviction that created the fine that he now wants
returned to him. Yet the undisturbed conviction requires us to leave
undisturbed too the State’s lawful receipt of the fine that accompanied it.
Because the district court correctly dismissed Rilea’s cause of action
for unjust enrichment against the State as an unlawful collateral attack
on his criminal conviction, we affirm the dismissal of his petition.
AFFIRMED.