In April 2024, two Fairfield police officers had arrested a driver for operating while intoxicated when a Jefferson County sheriff’s deputy arrived to assist. During an argument with a handcuffed passenger, the deputy grabbed the passenger and forcefully pushed his head toward the trunk of a vehicle. About a week later, Jefferson County Attorney Chauncey Moulding reviewed body-camera footage of the incident and emailed Jefferson County Sheriff Bart Richmond to ask whether the deputy’s conduct violated the Sheriff’s Office’s use-of-force policy. Richmond did not respond, although he and his chief deputy met with the deputy and ordered him to undergo de-escalation and communication retraining.
Moulding then sent the footage to the Keokuk County Attorney for an independent review. Richmond initially refused a request from Moulding’s assistant for the Sheriff’s Office’s use-of-force policy, insisting that the Keokuk County Attorney contact him directly. After Moulding personally ordered Richmond to provide the policy and threatened to seek an injunction, Richmond complied but declined to disclose details about internal disciplinary actions. Moulding subsequently placed Richmond on the County’s Brady–Giglio list and notified various state and federal law enforcement officials that Richmond was no longer considered a credible witness and “should not place himself, and should not be asked to place himself, into positions where he may be called as a witness to testify.”
Richmond petitioned for judicial review under Iowa Code § 80F.1(25), which authorizes a district court to “affirm, modify, or reverse” a prosecutor’s Brady–Giglio determination and grant relief “including removal of the officer from a Brady–Giglio list, as justice may require.” The district court found that although Richmond’s actions lacked “forthrightness,” they did not constitute actual deceit or dishonesty, and ordered Moulding to remove Richmond from the list. Moulding appealed, challenging the constitutionality of § 80F.1(25).
The Iowa Supreme Court upheld the statute. The Court first rejected Moulding’s argument that judicial review interfered with a prosecutor’s constitutional duty to disclose favorable evidence to criminal defendants. The Court explained that § 80F.1 “only regulates the list, not the disclosure of information in a particular case.” Removing an officer from a Brady–Giglio list therefore does not prevent a prosecutor from disclosing impeachment or exculpatory evidence concerning that officer. Indeed, prosecutors are not required to maintain such a list, and nothing in the statute dictates what they “must — or must not — disclose” in a particular case. The Court also rejected Moulding’s characterization of a Brady–Giglio list as encompassing every prosecutorial assessment of an officer’s credibility, explaining that the statutory definition instead describes a “formal, prospective, and publicly available declaration of an officer’s unreliability.” The Court therefore held that § 80F.1(25) did not interfere with prosecutors’ due process obligations.
The Court likewise rejected Moulding’s separation-of-powers challenge. Although prosecution is an executive function, § 80F.1(25) does not give courts control over core prosecutorial decisions. A district court may remove an officer from a Brady–Giglio list, but it cannot require a prosecutor to call the officer as a witness or dictate whether the prosecutor discloses impeachment evidence in a particular case. “Those powers remain with the prosecutor,” while judicial review is limited to the separate decision to maintain an officer on a Brady–Giglio list. The Court characterized the legislature’s regulation of the relationship between prosecutors and law enforcement officers, coupled with judicial review of disputes under that law, as “the three branches at work, not a violation of separation of powers.”
Finally, the Court declined to consider Moulding’s argument that the statute was unconstitutionally vague because he had not preserved the issue in the district court. The Iowa Supreme Court therefore rejected Moulding’s constitutional challenges and affirmed the judgment ordering Richmond removed from the county attorney’s Brady–Giglio list.
Richmond v. Jefferson County Attorney, No. 25-0366, ___ N.W.3d ___ (Iowa May 1, 2026).