State of Iowa v. Joshua Lee Adams ( 2023 )

IN THE COURT OF APPEALS OF IOWA
No. 22-0614
Filed August 9, 2023
STATE OF IOWA,
Plaintiff-Appellee,
vs.
JOSHUA LEE ADAMS,
Defendant-Appellant.
________________________________________________________________
Appeal from the Iowa District Court for Polk County, Scott J. Beattie, Judge.
A defendant appeals his convictions for murder in the first degree.
AFFIRMED.
Martha J. Lucey, State Appellate Defender, and Mary K. Conroy, Assistant
Appellate Defender, for appellant.
Brenna Bird, Attorney General, and Anagha Dixit, Assistant Attorney
General, for appellee.
Heard by Ahlers, P.J., Badding, J., and Doyle, S.J.*
*Senior judge assigned by order pursuant to Iowa Code section 602.9206
(2023).
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BADDING, Judge.
Joshua Adams, a schizophrenic who was “consistently inconsistent” in his
delusion that his mom and uncle were imposters, appeals from his convictions for
their murders. He claims the “evidence presented at the bench trial proved, by a
preponderance of the evidence, that [he] was legally insane at the time” of the
murders. We affirm.
I. Background Facts and Proceedings
Joshua Adams was described by his neighbors as “very odd.” He liked to
dress up in “Mortal [K]ombat outfits, police detective outfits, wear badges,” and
play with nunchucks in the yard of the home that he shared with his mom, Tracy.
Adams claimed that he was a ninja and a member of the Green Berets. And he
thought that he was married to Paris Hilton and Ivanka Trump. At other times, he
claimed to be the President of the United States, an Olympic gold medalist, a
supermodel, a Hollywood actor, and the son of God.
Adams was diagnosed with schizophrenia in 2004, after he reported hearing
voices. He was hospitalized in 2009 and 2012 and prescribed antipsychotic
medication. Adams said that he was good about taking his medication because it
made his “brain feel better,” but toward the end of December 2018, his prescription
ran out.
On December 28, Tracy was getting ready to leave their home and pick up
her brother, Gaylord, from work because he did not have a car. The two planned
to go to a Christmas party later that evening. Adams argued with Tracy before she
left because he was upset that she was giving Gaylord so many rides. Before
leaving the house, Tracy asked her neighbor to fill up her tires. He did so and
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Tracy headed out around 3:00 p.m. When she and Gaylord got back home, Tracy
thanked her neighbor and chatted with him for a few minutes before going inside
the house after her brother.
Less than ten minutes later, Adams was at his neighbor’s front door,
pounding to be let in. The neighbor’s girlfriend opened the door and saw Adams
“completely covered in blood from his hands to his elbows.” His sweatshirt was
soaked in blood, his flannel pajama bottoms were ripped, and he was not wearing
any shoes in the cold December weather. Adams asked the neighbor for help and
some water. The neighbor, who had seen Adams drop a knife in the neighbor’s
yard on his way over, questioned: “What happened? You just kill your mom?”
Adams responded, “That ain’t my mom.”1
The neighbor’s girlfriend called the police. While she was on the phone,
Adams walked back to his house and sat down in a swing outside. The neighbor
followed him and asked again, “What’s going on[?] . . . . I was just talking to your
mom.” Adams answered, “Oh, they come at me.” The neighbor said that Adams
then “pretty much said he stabbed them.” A bit later, Adams started looking at the
neighbor “weird,” prompting the neighbor to tell him: “Dude, I ain’t your mom. I’ll
fucking kill you . . . if you come at me.” At that, Adams took off running down the
street. The neighbor chased him until they reached a police vehicle arriving at the
scene.
1 Immediately after the murders, the neighbor told the police twice that Adams
made this statement—in a police vehicle on his way to the station for a witness
interview and during the interview itself. And his girlfriend reported that statement
to the 911 dispatcher during her call for help. But by the time they testified at trial
more than two years later, neither remembered Adams saying, “That ain’t my
mom.”
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Adams ran up to the vehicle and tried to open the door, while pointing at the
neighbor and saying, “Shoot him, shoot him.” The neighbor pointed back and said,
“No. It’s him.” Seeing that Adams was “covered in blood head to toe,” the police
officer ordered Adams to the ground and handcuffed him. The officer then placed
Adams in the back of his police vehicle before he and another officer went into the
house where they found Tracy and Gaylord, stabbed to death. In the neighbor’s
yard, officers recovered a broken knife handle and blade. On the steps leading
into Tracy’s home, they found another knife handle. Inside, they located a third
knife handle on the couch in the living room next to Tracy’s body and another blade
underneath Gaylord’s body. In all, Adams used three knives during the stabbings,
grabbing new ones from a kitchen drawer when the ones he was using broke.
Several hours after the murders, Adams was interviewed by two detectives.
At the start, when one of the detectives asked him what happened, Adams said,
“Do I have to tell you that?” Later, Adams told the detectives, “If I talk too much
about it, it is not a good thing.” But with some prompting, Adams told them about
the argument he had with his mom before she left to pick up Gaylord. When she
came back, Adams said he was waiting in the house with a fish knife. He told the
detectives that she was telling him things that “were the opposite of what” he
wanted to hear and that she was “not [his] mom” but a “lady that was acting like
[his] mom.” When asked who was with his mom, Adams answered, “Supposed to
be my uncle but it’s not my uncle.” One of the detectives asked, “What do you
mean?” Adams explained: “It’s a guy that looks like my uncle . . . . but it’s not my
uncle.” He later described him as some kind of “Gaylord lookalike.” Toward the
middle of his interview, Adams said he “knows for a fact” that it wasn’t his mom or
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uncle because “they were all dead by now.” And then he claimed to be the
President of the United States.
After some more questioning, Adams explained that after his mom got
home, she got “psycho” and “crazy” with him. She told him that her ex-boyfriend
was coming over. This upset Adams, who did not like the ex-boyfriend because
he made his mom cry. He told the detectives that his mom told him to “go for it,”
referring to the knife in his hand. So Adams said that he “gripped up” and started
stabbing his mom. She fell and yelled at him to stop, but he kept stabbing her.
Gaylord came out from a back bedroom to help his sister, but Adams started
stabbing him too. At some point, the blade on the knife broke. Adams went to the
kitchen, got another knife, and kept stabbing Gaylord. Then the second knife
broke, so Adams got another one from the kitchen and stabbed Gaylord some
more. When that one broke, Adams said that he left and went to the neighbor’s
house to ask for help. By the time Adams was done, Tracy had twenty-three stab
wounds, while Gaylord had more than nineteen.
The State charged Adams with two counts of murder in the first degree.
The month after the murders, Adams’s cousin visited him at jail. When his cousin
asked Adams if he knew why he was in jail, Adams answered, “I stabbed my mom
and Gaylord.” But later in the visit, Adams asked, “Are they still alive somehow?”
When his cousin replied, “You killed them. They’re dead,” Adams questioned, “Is
there still a Tracy and Gaylord running around?”
Soon after that visit, defense counsel applied for a competency evaluation.
The court suspended the proceedings and ordered treatment to restore Adams’s
competency. The proceedings resumed a couple of months later, although even
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with medication, Adams was still experiencing some delusions. In a phone call
with his grandma in August 2020, Adams said, “When I stabbed my mom, you
know, it wasn’t my mom. It was a robot.”
Adams filed a notice that he intended to rely on the defense of insanity.2
The case proceeded to a bench trial in July 2021, following which the district court
rejected Adams’s insanity defense and found him guilty as charged.
II. Standard of Review
Challenges to the sufficiency of the evidence are reviewed for correction of
errors at law. State v. Brimmer, 983 N.W.2d 247, 256 (Iowa 2022). “In a bench
trial, we review the district court’s findings as we would a jury verdict, meaning we
will affirm the verdict if supported by substantial evidence.” State v. Belk,
No. 21-1742, 2022 WL 10861390, at *2 (Iowa Ct. App. Oct. 19, 2022); accord State
v. Myers, 924 N.W.2d 823, 827 (Iowa 2019). “Evidence is substantial if it could
convince a rational trier of fact the defendant is guilty of the crime charged beyond
a reasonable doubt.” State v. Jacobs, 607 N.W.2d 679, 682 (Iowa 2000).
III. Analysis
In Iowa, a defendant cannot be convicted of a crime
if at the time the crime is committed the person suffers from such a
diseased or deranged condition of the mind as to render the person
incapable of knowing the nature and quality of the act the person is
committing or incapable of distinguishing between right and wrong in
relation to that act.
Iowa Code § 701.4 (2018). The defendant bears the burden of proving this
defense by a preponderance of the evidence. See id.2 The notice also included the defense of diminished responsibility, though Adams
did not pursue that defense at trial.
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The only contested issue at trial was whether Adams met that burden. And
that issue depended on the testimony of two expert witnesses—Dr. Tracy Thomas
for the State and Dr. Steven Bruce for the defense. These experts agreed that
Adams suffered from a diseased or deranged condition of the mind when he
murdered his mom and uncle. They both diagnosed him with schizophrenia and
Capgras syndrome—“a fairly rare component of schizophrenia.” Dr. Bruce
explained that the condition, which is also known as “imposter syndrome,” is “a
syndrome in which somebody believes that—usually somebody close to them—a
parent, spouse, a family member—has been replaced by a duplicate, an imposter,
in their place.” Where the experts parted ways, however, was with the next two
prongs of the insanity defense—whether Adams’s mental condition rendered him
incapable of knowing the nature and quality of the act he committed or
distinguishing between right and wrong in relation to that act. See id.In addressing those prongs, Dr. Bruce zeroed in on Adams’s delusions,
testifying that in his twenty-five years of experience in forensic and clinical settings,
he had “never encountered somebody who had such significant delusions.” He
concluded that because of those delusions, Adams did not understand the nature
and quality of his acts—that he was stabbing his mom and uncle—and could not
tell right from wrong. As support for this conclusion, Dr. Bruce pointed to Adams’s
actions after the murders, noting that he made no effort to hide what he did. Cf.
State v. Stowe, No. 21-0080, 2022 WL 2826025, at *2–3 (Iowa Ct. App.
July 20, 2022) (detailing the defendant’s actions to cover up the murder of his
grandmother in affirming the district court’s rejection of his insanity defense).
Instead, Adams left the murder weapons in plain sight, went to the neighbor’s
8
house covered in blood, calmly sat in a swing outside the crime scene, and ran to
a police vehicle for help.
Dr. Bruce testified that Adams’s use of multiple knives was irrelevant
because of his delusion that his mom and uncle were already dead and had been
replaced by imposters. Along those same lines, Dr. Bruce did not attach
significance to Adams’s claims of self-defense because “[i]f he believes that they’re
imposters and robots and that . . . there’s a conspiracy against him, then” it would
make sense that he had a “mindset of ‘I have to attack first to protect myself.’” As
far as Adams’s reluctance to talk with the detectives during his interview, Dr. Bruce
testified that was a “manifestation of his paranoia” that “others were listening.” And
Dr. Bruce said there was “zero evidence, zero basis in fact, zero research” to
support a claim that people who cannot distinguish between right and wrong are
typically “indignant and surprised that they’re being arrested.” He also pointed out
that Adams is “very upset and indignant” in the video of him in the holding cell after
the murders, demanding “over and over again” for the handcuffs to be taken off
because he is the President of the United States.
Dr. Thomas looked at these same facts and interpreted them differently.
She testified that when she asked Adams why he went to the neighbor’s house,
“he indicated, well, I had just killed my mom and uncle and I didn’t have anywhere
to go, I was in bare feet, and I needed somebody to call the police because that’s
what you do in an emergency.” That, to her, showed Adams’s knowledge that his
act was “legally wrong,” as did his claim of self-defense and lack of surprise at
being arrested. See State v. Hamann, 285 N.W.2d 180, 183 (Iowa 1979) (stating
the words “right” and “wrong” under our statute’s codification of the M’Naghten rule
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of insanity “should be understood in their legal and not in their moral sense”). On
the last issue, Dr. Thomas noted that while Adams was saying he was the
President in the holding cell video, she “didn’t hear him saying something like, ‘How
can you arrest me for being the President?’ or, ‘How can you arrest me? I killed a
robot. I’ve done a good deed.’”
Unlike Dr. Bruce, Dr. Thomas thought Adams’s use of multiple knives was
significant:
[A]n individual that did not understand the nature of their
behavior—so . . . someone who didn’t know that they were using a
knife and stabbing someone—would be unlikely to go back three
different times to get three different knives to keep stabbing an
individual. So that indicated to me that he knew what he was doing.
In terms of quality . . . I’m looking at whether someone knows
the likely outcome of their behavior. In this case, stabbing someone
would lead to them being significantly harmed or killed. He made
numerous statements saying, “I kept stabbing her. She was dying.”
He—in regards to his uncle, he said, “He kept fucking around, so I
kept stabbing him.” So there were multiple statements to multiple
people that he was stabbing them in order to get them to stop or to
die, that he knew they were dying, and he continued to stab them.
So that all indicates knowledge of nature and quality.
As for Adams’s delusion that his mom and uncle were imposters, Dr.
Thomas testified:
[B]asically from the time he was arrested until he talked to me I think
he was consistently inconsistent in terms of that delusion. So there
were times that he would call his mom and uncle “mom” and “uncle”
or “uncle Gaylord.” There were other times that he would say, “But I
don’t think that’s who they were,” or they were imposters.
His flexibility with the delusion was one of the data points that led Dr. Thomas to
conclude that he was capable of knowing the nature and quality of the act he
committed and distinguishing between right and wrong. See State v. Dye,
No. 08-0887, 2009 WL 3337617, at *4 (Iowa Ct. App. 2009) (rejecting defendant’s
10
insanity defense where the evidence showed that, while he “may have suffered
from a mental illness, there were, at a minimum, periods of time during which [his]
mental illnesses did not impair his ability to think rationally”). But, she testified,
“even if . . . we all wanted to agree that he thought they were imposters, I would
still say he knew that he was stabbing people . . . and killing them.” See Villanueva
v. State, No. 01-20-00303-CR, 2021 WL 2832974, at *13 (Tex. Ct. App.
July 8, 2021) (finding that a defendant, who had Capgras syndrome, referring to
those she harmed as her “daughter” and “father-in-law” was “some evidence that
she understood they were her family members, which the jury reasonably could
have concluded was inconsistent with [an expert’s] opinion that [she] did not think
these were real people and therefore did not understand that her attacks were
illegal”).
Finally, Dr. Thomas criticized Dr. Bruce’s report because
[h]e went from “Mr. Adams has schizophrenia” to basically, “He didn’t
know the nature and quality of his actions and couldn’t distinguish
right from wrong.” And I didn’t see an analysis of the things, like what
happened at the crime scene or what the different records said or his
behavior during the interview with the detectives. That kind of
interpretive section wasn’t there, so I wasn’t sure how he came to
those conclusions.
The district court found this critique compelling, ruling that while both
experts were “qualified and credible,” Dr. Thomas “most appropriately framed her
opinion consistent with the current law of insanity.” The court continued:
Dr. Bruce’s opinion failed to address the question correctly within the
State’s case law context. Specifically, Dr. Bruce takes a broad view
of the statute, generally equating a mental disability and delusion
with legal insanity. Iowa courts, however, have taken a narrow view
of the statute. This narrow view was articulated well by Dr. Thomas,
and in this case, she appropriately applied the facts to the law.
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(Footnote omitted.) Accord State v. Venzke, 576 N.W.2d 382, 385 (Iowa Ct. App.
1997) (affirming trial court’s conclusion that a schizophrenic defendant’s “delusions
and hallucinations were not sufficiently severe as to render him insane” under our
statute).
In line with Dr. Thomas’s opinion, the court found the greater weight of
evidence showed Adams did know the nature and quality of his acts:
The evidence indicates that he knew that he was stabbing an
individual with a knife. In the interviews with the police officers
immediately after the incident, Adams repeatedly referred to the fact
that he had stabbed his mother and uncle. As discussed by both
experts, Adams used three different knives to attack and kill Tracy
and Gaylord. He returned twice to the kitchen drawer to retrieve
another knife after one broke. The use of three knives indicates that
he knew that what he was doing was stabbing and that a knife was
necessary. Likewise, Adams indicated that he prepared for his
confrontation with Tracy by arming himself with a knife.
. . . . He referred to the fact that [his mom] begged him to
“stop,” and he continued. He also explicitly referred to the fact that
she was “dying” as he stabbed her. Likewise, in reference to
Gaylord, Adams . . . . referred to the fact that Gaylord attempted to
“stop some shit, and his ass got stabbed too.” Again, these
statements indicate that Adams knew that his actions would result in
the death of the individuals he stabbed.
As for Adams’s ability to distinguish right from wrong, the court concluded
that he
did know the wrongness of his actions. Initially, this can be seen by
the fact that the defendant told his neighbors that he was attacked
by his mother and was acting in self-defense. While he stayed at the
scene of the incident, he ran when sirens were heard approaching
the scene. He attempted to blame his neighbor by telling the police
officer to “shoot him.” Importantly, when the police initially
interviewed him, Adams stated that he did not want to describe what
he had done because “if he talked too much, it was not a good thing.”
Finally, as Dr. Thomas points out, Adams was not surprised or
shocked when he was informed that he was being placed under
arrest. While it is true that many of these things could be interpreted
differently, the Court believes the most logical and consistent
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interpretation of his statements and actions are that he knew what
he was doing was wrong.
On appeal, Adams urges a different interpretation of the facts outlined
above. For instance, Adams points out that he called his mom and uncle “robots”
after the murders, which he says shows “that he did not believe he had stabbed or
killed a human being.” But, as the district court found, the first time Adams made
that reference was in an August 2020 call with his grandma—well after the murders
occurred. See State v. Davis, 951 N.W.2d 8, 20 (Iowa 2020) (“Sanity is judged at
the time of the offense.”). In any event, our ultimate task is to determine whether
the evidence supports the findings actually made, not whether it would support the
contrary findings urged by Adams. See Belk, 2022 WL 10861390, at *2 (citing
State v. Jones, 967 N.W.2d 336, 339 (Iowa 2021)). Upon reviewing “all the
evidence and the record in the light most favorable to the trial court’s decision,” we
conclude substantial evidence supports the findings the court made in rejecting
Adams’s insanity defense. See Myers, 924 N.W.2d at 827 (citation omitted).
As for Adams’s complaints about the court’s evaluation of the experts,
“[w]hen conflicting psychiatric testimony is presented to the fact finder, the issue
of sanity is clearly for the fact finder to decide.” Jacobs, 607 N.W.2d at 685. The
district court, as the trier of fact, “is not obligated to accept opinion evidence, even
from experts, as conclusive.” Id. “When a case evolves into a battle of the
experts,” as this one did, “we, as the reviewing court, readily defer to the district
court’s judgment as it is in a better position to weigh the credibility of the
witnesses.” Id.13
Because it was the district court’s prerogative to weigh the expert opinions,
we affirm the court’s findings on those experts, its conclusion on the insanity
defense, and Adams’s convictions for the first-degree murders of his mother and
uncle. See Stowe, 2022 WL 2826025, at *3 (affirming the district court’s decision
to credit one expert opinion that the defendant was not insane over two differing
expert opinions).
AFFIRMED.