Supreme Court reinstates Des Moines man's attempted murder conviction
The Iowa Supreme Court has affirmed a Des Moines man's attempted murder conviction, reversing a lower court's ruling that prosecutors had charged him with shooting the wrong victim.
Anthony Mong, now 34, was convicted at trial in the 2018 shooting in Clive. Prosecutors alleged he was in a long-running dispute with another man over his girlfriend. After a confrontation, according to court filings, Mong fired at the other man and missed, hitting a second man nearby.
In 2022, the Iowa Court of Appeals largely reversed Mong's conviction. Key to the court's decision were the trial court's instructions to the jury that the prosecutors had to prove "the defendant specifically intended to cause a serious injury" to the man who was shot. That wasn't the prosecutors' claim, the appellate court pointed out: even they agreed that Mong had been shooting at someone else.
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The appellate court noted that Iowa law permits a conviction of attempted murder even when the injured person was not the intended target, but found that the too-specific jury instructions prosecutors agreed to in Mong's case did not cover that circumstance, and reversed his conviction.
On Friday, the Iowa Supreme Court overruled that decision and reinstated most of Mong's conviction. Writing for a unanimous court, Justice Christopher McDonald said it didn't matter whether the jury instructions identified the actual or intended target, because Iowa's doctrine of "transferred intent" makes the intended victim and actual victim interchangeable for purposes of Mong's conviction.
The Supreme Court also rejected Mong's challenge to the racial makeup of his jury pool, finding Mong, who is Black, presented no evidence of any policy or practice by Polk County that resulted in an unbalanced pool. But it did strike down Mong's conviction for intimidation with a dangerous weapon, finding the evidence showed the man who was shot testified he was not afraid of Mong prior to being wounded.
William Morris covers courts for the Des Moines Register. He can be contacted at wrmorris2@registermedia.com, 715-573-8166 or on Twitter at @DMRMorris.
This article originally appeared on Des Moines Register: Iowa Supreme Court restores Des Moines man's attempted murder conviction
