Full Opinion

IN THE COURT OF APPEALS OF IOWA _______________ No. 25-0863 Filed October 21, 2026 _______________ State of Iowa, Plaintiff–Appellee, v. Lamarcus Lemario Martez Williams, Defendant–Appellant. _______________ Appeal from the Iowa District Court for Black Hawk County, The Honorable Linda M. Fangman, Judge. _______________ AFFIRMED _______________ Martha J. Lucey, State Appellate Defender, and Mary K. Conroy (argued), Assistant Appellate Defender, attorneys for appellant. Brenna Bird, Attorney General, and David Banta (argued), Assistant Attorney General, attorneys for appellee. _______________ Heard at oral argument by Schumacher, P.J., Sandy, J., and Doyle, S.J. Opinion by Doyle, S.J. 1 DOYLE, Senior Judge. A jury convicted Lamarcus Williams of voluntary manslaughter for killing his girlfriend, Rebecca Taylor. Williams appeals, challenging the sufficiency of the evidence. First, he argues that the State failed to prove Taylor died as a result of being assaulted. Second, he contends that there was no evidence he acted in response to a serious provocation. He asks that we vacate his conviction and remand for dismissal or for entry of an amended judgment on involuntary manslaughter. Because we find sufficient evidence to support the causation element and no reversible error in the jury’s finding of serious provocation, we affirm. BACKGROUND FACTS AND PROCEEDINGS Shortly before 11:00 p.m. on November 30, 2022, Rebecca Taylor called 911. During the 911 call, she frantically told the dispatcher that her boyfriend tried to stab her with a knife. A man could be heard yelling in the background, then Taylor shouted: “Listen! You leave me alone! Get away from me! Get away from me! You are scaring me!” Her shouting intensified and became unintelligible, then the call disconnected. The dispatcher called back several times, and the man—later identified as Taylor’s boyfriend, Lamarcus Williams—finally answered. Williams told the dispatcher that “it was a false alarm,” that he was putting a knife in the sink while doing dishes, and that Taylor was “drunk.” Police officers soon arrived at Taylor’s house and knocked on the front door. The officers saw Williams inside and talked to him through a window. Williams did not let the officers in; instead, he moved a couch to block the door. A few minutes later, an officer looked through another window into a bedroom and saw Williams “trying to pull somebody up” off the floor next to the bed. At that point, the officers called an ambulance and forced entry 2 into the house. Two officers went to the bedroom, where they found Taylor “unconscious” and “unresponsive” with “her head roll[ed] back onto the bed.” She was not breathing and the officers “could not detect a pulse.” One of the officers performed chest compressions on her until emergency medical personnel arrived. Meanwhile, other officers questioned Williams in the living room. Williams repeatedly told them that Taylor had been drinking and using cocaine that day. He also told them that Taylor “fell on the floor” after she threw up in the bathroom. A detective interviewed Williams at the police station later that night. During the interview, Williams eventually admitted that he and Taylor “got into a physical fight” and that he “might have punched her” in the head. Williams also said that he “pushed” Taylor, and she hit her head on the dresser in the bedroom and went “unresponsive” as the police were arriving at the house. After the interview, the detective and another officer tried to take Williams to another room in the police station. As they were escorting him to the other room, Williams pushed past the detective and ran out of the building. The other officer chased Williams outside before catching up with him and handcuffing him. Police also executed a search warrant at Taylor’s house that night. They found a knife in the kitchen sink and prescription medications, but they did not find “any signs of vomit in the bathroom” or “anything consistent with” cocaine use. Taylor was admitted to a hospital that night but never regained consciousness. She was declared dead a few days later. 3 The State charged Williams with second-degree murder, a class “B” felony, in violation of Iowa Code section 707.3 (2022). He pleaded not guilty. The case went to jury trial in March 2025. At trial, the State presented the audio recordings of Taylor’s 911 call and the dispatcher’s return calls, the responding officers’ body camera footage, video recordings of Williams’s interview at the police station and his attempted escape afterward, photos taken during the search of the house, photos of Taylor’s injuries, and a redacted copy of Williams’s written guilty plea to assaulting Taylor “while displaying a knife, cutting off air flow” seven months earlier in April 2022. The State also presented testimony from the 911 operations manager, the responding officers, a crime scene investigator, the detective who interviewed Williams, an officer who responded to the April 2022 assault, Taylor’s sisters, Taylor’s adult son, a domestic violence expert, and the medical examiner who performed Taylor’s autopsy. Taylor’s son testified that in April 2022, he saw Williams “in the kitchen” with his “hands around [Taylor’s] neck.” The son recalled that he “pulled [Williams] off of [Taylor],” and Taylor called the police to report that assault. Taylor’s sisters testified that Taylor’s relationship with Williams was “toxic” and “kind of weird.” One of the sisters recalled that she witnessed Williams “pacing back and forth saying how he was gonna kill” Taylor when she stayed at Taylor’s house around November 30, 2022. Both sisters spoke with Taylor on the evening of November 30. They did not believe Taylor was intoxicated. And one of the sisters remembered hearing Williams in the background when she spoke with Taylor on the phone around 9:50 p.m.— about an hour before Taylor’s 911 call. According to the sister, Williams “sounded angry.” 4 The medical examiner testified about Taylor’s injuries and the cause and manner of her death. He explained that Taylor had “contusions or bruises on her head, her chest, her back, and her left arm,” as well as scabs1 on “her neck, her chest, her back, her left arm, and her right hand”—all of which “could be indicative of blunt force injuries.” The medical examiner also found internal hemorrhaging in one of the strap muscles and the fascial tissue in Taylor’s neck, along with “some petechial hemorrhages in her mouth” and her eyes—all of which were “consistent with [there] having been some kind of pressure on her neck or neck compression at some point.” The medical examiner also explained that Taylor had underlying health conditions, including obesity and an enlarged heart. And she had “an inactive metabolite of cocaine” in her blood sample from the hospital, which indicated “that at some point in the not-too-distant past she had used cocaine,” but it did not indicate that she had overdosed. The medical examiner determined that the cause of Taylor’s death was “sudden cardiorespiratory arrest-resuscitated in the setting of a physical altercation with another individual,” and the manner of her death was “homicide.” In other words, a physical altercation with another person put enough strain on Taylor’s body that “her heart and her lungs stopped working.” Ultimately, the medical examiner testified that “the primary contributing factor to Rebecca Taylor’s death” was “the physical assault which led to her cardiac arrest.” 1 The medical examiner explained that the scabs “could have been abrasions or scrapes back when [Taylor] first . . . went unresponsive and presented to the hospital. But by [the time of the autopsy] they had scabbed over and become scabs.” 5 The jury found Williams guilty of the lesser-included offense of voluntary manslaughter. See Iowa Code § 707.4. The district court sentenced him to an indeterminate ten-year prison term. Williams appeals. DISCUSSION We review Williams’s sufficiency-of-the-evidence challenge “for correction of errors at law.” State v. Crawford, 972 N.W.2d 189, 202 (Iowa 2022) (citation omitted). “[W]e are highly deferential to the jury’s verdict.” Id. And we are bound by that verdict so long as it is supported by substantial evidence. Id. “Substantial evidence, in turn, is evidence sufficient to convince a rational trier of fact the defendant is guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.” State v. Brimmer, 983 N.W.2d 247, 256 (Iowa 2022) (cleaned up). When reviewing the evidence, we view it “in the light most favorable to the State, including all legitimate inferences and presumptions that may fairly and reasonably be deduced from the record evidence.” Crawford, 972 N.W.2d at 202 (cleaned up). “It is not our place to resolve conflicts in the evidence, to pass upon the credibility of witnesses, to determine the plausibility of explanations, or to weigh the evidence; such matters are for the jury.” Brimmer, 983 N.W.2d at 256 (cleaned up). Because Williams did not object to the jury instructions, they are the law of the case for purposes of reviewing the sufficiency of the evidence. See State v. Banes, 910 N.W.2d 634, 639 (Iowa Ct. App. 2018). The district court instructed the jury that it could convict Williams of the lesser-included offense of voluntary manslaughter if the State proved: 1. On or about the 30th day of November 2022, [Williams] intentionally assaulted Rebecca Taylor . . . . 2. Rebecca Taylor died as a result of being assaulted. 6 3. The assault was done solely by reason of sudden, violent, and irresistible passion resulting from serious provocation. Williams challenges the State’s proof of the second and third elements under that instruction. We will address each claim in turn. I. Causation Although Williams does not dispute the first element—that he intentionally assaulted Taylor—he argues that the State failed to prove the assault resulted in her death. He contends that Taylor’s underlying health conditions and substance use were “risk factors for cardiac arrest.” And he claims that the medical examiner’s opinion that a physical assault led to Taylor’s cardiac arrest was “based only on speculation.” But even if Taylor’s underlying health conditions made her more susceptible to cardiac arrest than the average person, “the law imposes no duty on a victim to be in sufficiently good health to withstand a beating.” See State v. Stendrup, 983 N.W.2d 231, 242–44 (Iowa 2022) (finding substantial evidence that assault “was a factual or but-for cause of” the victim’s death where the victim, a chronic methamphetamine user, died from a cardiac arrhythmia when the defendant beat him with a bat); see also State v. Deason, No. 24-0932, 2025 WL 3654120, at *2 (Iowa Ct. App. Dec. 17, 2025); State v. Rockenbach, No. 24-1049, 2025 WL 2058378, at *3–4 (Iowa Ct. App. July 23, 2025). And the jury was free to credit the medical examiner’s testimony regarding the cause of Taylor’s death and to discredit possible alternative explanations. See State v. Sanford, 814 N.W.2d 611, 615 (Iowa 2012) (“[T]he jury is free to reject certain evidence, and credit other evidence.” (cleaned up)); State v. Shanahan, 712 N.W.2d 121, 135 (Iowa 2006) (“The function of the jury is to weigh the evidence and place credibility where it belongs.” (cleaned up)). 7 The court instructed the jury that “the injury inflicted by [Williams] resulted in [the] death of Rebecca Taylor if it caused or directly contributed to [her] death.” The medical examiner gave detailed descriptions of Taylor’s injuries and the possible mechanisms of those injuries in his testimony. The jury saw photos of Taylor’s injuries. The jury also saw the video recording of Williams’s interview at the police station, in which he admitted that Taylor went “unresponsive” after he pushed her into the dresser as the police were arriving at the house. When the police entered the house, Taylor was not breathing and did not have a pulse. Taylor never regained consciousness. And the medical examiner testified that despite her underlying health conditions and substance use, “the primary contributing factor to Rebecca Taylor’s death” was “the physical assault which led to her cardiac arrest.” Viewing this record in the light most favorable to the State, substantial evidence supports the jury’s finding that Taylor died as a result of being assaulted by Williams. II. Provocation Williams also argues that the State presented no evidence that he assaulted Taylor “solely by reason of sudden, violent, and irresistible passion resulting from serious provocation”—the third element of voluntary manslaughter under the jury instructions.2 He contends that because “the instruction required the State to prove there was serious provocation and the 2 As Williams points out, our supreme court has stated that provocation is not an element of voluntary manslaughter. See State v. Williams, 525 N.W.2d 847, 851 (Iowa 1994) (“This argument assumes that provocation is an element of the voluntary manslaughter offense. It is not.”). But the supreme court recently approved of a nearly identical voluntary manslaughter marshaling instruction including serious provocation as an element of the offense. See State v. Tolbert, 31 N.W.3d 746, 750–54 (Iowa 2026). 8 State failed to do so,” we “must find insufficient evidence supports [his] conviction for voluntary manslaughter.” Williams thus urges that if substantial evidence supports the causation element—as we have found— then the proper remedy is to “remand for entry of an amended judgment of conviction and resentencing on the lesser-included offense of involuntary manslaughter.”3 See State v. Ortiz, 905 N.W.2d 174, 183 (Iowa 2017) (approving entry of “an amended judgment of conviction with respect to the lesser-included offense when the evidence is insufficient to support the jury’s guilty verdict on the greater offense, but is sufficient for the lesser included offense” (cleaned up)). On appeal, the State concedes that the evidence presented at trial was insufficient to prove serious provocation, and thus, the district court erred by submitting the voluntary manslaughter marshaling instruction to the jury. See State v. Thompson, 836 N.W.2d 470, 476–77 (Iowa 2013) (“Lesser offenses must be submitted to the jury as included within the charged offense if but only if they meet both the appropriate legal and factual tests.” (citation omitted)). But neither the State nor Williams objected to the submission of that instruction. Indeed, Williams requested it. And generally, a defendant “will not be permitted to allege an error in which he himself acquiesced, or 3 The court instructed the jury that to convict Williams of involuntary manslaughter, the State had to prove that Williams either “recklessly committed the crime of Assault” or “recklessly made physical contact with Rebecca Taylor” and that he “unintentionally caused the death of Rebecca Taylor.” Williams conceded that the State proved the first element of second-degree murder—that he “assaulted Rebecca Taylor”— during closing arguments at trial. Similarly, Williams does not challenge the State’s proof of the first element of voluntary manslaughter—that he “intentionally assaulted Rebecca Taylor”—on appeal. 9 which was committed or invited by him.” State v. Sage, 162 N.W.2d 502, 504 (Iowa 1968) (cleaned up). Our supreme court has explained that voluntary manslaughter “amounts to murder without the ingredient of malice: ‘A person commits voluntary manslaughter when that person causes the death of another person, under circumstances which would otherwise be murder’ if it were not for the existence of provocation.” State v. Taylor, 452 N.W.2d 605, 606–07 (Iowa 1990) (quoting Iowa Code § 707.4); see also State v. Tolbert, 31 N.W.3d 746, 751 (Iowa 2026) (“[W]e have long settled that acting in the ‘heat of passion’ involves a temporary loss of control sparked by a serious provocation, which is a mental state incompatible with the deliberation that leads to the ‘fixed purpose’ required for malice.”). “For that reason, if the elements of murder are supported by substantial evidence, an erroneous determination that provocation exists is not reversible error because it is error that favors the accused.” State v. Williams, 525 N.W.2d 847, 851 (Iowa 1994). The supreme court has thus affirmed a defendant’s conviction for voluntary manslaughter based on a faulty finding of provocation where the evidence would have been sufficient to convict the defendant of second-degree murder. See Taylor, 452 N.W.2d at 607 (reasoning that the “district court’s erroneous finding of provocation merely gave [the defendant] a break to which he was not entitled.”). Williams argues that the supreme court’s decisions in Taylor and Williams do not control the outcome in this case for two reasons. First, Williams notes that “neither of those cases discussed the law-of-the-case doctrine, which applies here.” Cf. Taylor, 452 N.W.2d at 605 (stating the defendant was convicted “in a jury-waived trial”); Williams, 525 N.W.2d at 851 (analyzing sufficiency challenge without setting forth jury instructions). 10 Second, he argues that “the jury instructions in this case illustrate why the Supreme Court’s rationale in Taylor and Williams that any error related to the lack of provocation was to the defendant’s benefit is incorrect.” As Williams points out, the court gave the jury acquittal-first instructions. See Tolbert, 31 N.W.3d at 753 (“An acquittal-first instruction directs the jury not to consider a lesser included offense unless it first finds the defendant not guilty of the greater offense.”). Under those instructions, the jury was to first consider whether the State proved all the elements of second-degree murder. If the State failed to prove any of those elements, the court instructed the jury that Williams “is not guilty of Murder in the Second Degree, and you will then consider the charge of Voluntary Manslaughter.” As Williams also points out, as instructed, second-degree murder and voluntary manslaughter shared two elements: (1) that Williams assaulted Taylor and (2) that “Taylor died as a result of being assaulted.” So according to Williams, “the only element of murder in the second degree the jury could have possibly concluded the State failed to prove was the only remaining one—the existence of malice aforethought.” Williams thus urges that “the jury instructions in this case, along with the verdict the jury actually reached, illustrate the [supreme court’s] rationale in Williams and Taylor is inapplicable” because “at the point the jury considered the offense of voluntary manslaughter in this case, it had already determined that Williams had not committed murder.” While Williams’s arguments are not entirely without merit, we are “obligated to follow our supreme court’s precedent.”4 State v. Carter, 4 Williams requested that the supreme court retain this case “to provide guidance regarding the marshalling instructions used in homicides and the limitations of the Williams and Taylor decisions.” But the supreme court transferred the case to us. 11 No. 18-1502, 2019 WL 2372231, at *7 (Iowa Ct. App. June 5, 2019). As detailed above, our supreme court has held that in voluntary manslaughter cases, “if the elements of murder are supported by substantial evidence, an erroneous determination that provocation exists is not reversible error because it is error that favors the accused.” Williams, 525 N.W.2d at 851. And our court has consistently applied this logic in rejecting defendants’ challenges to the sufficiency of the evidence for voluntary manslaughter where the record would support a second-degree murder conviction. See Rockenbach, 2025 WL 2058378, at *4–5 (further review denied Sep. 15, 2025); State v. Flowers, No. 23-1822, 2025 WL 2234883, at *3–4 (Iowa Ct. App. Aug. 6, 2025) (further review denied Sept. 29, 2025); see also State v. Maynard, No. 22-1772, 2023 WL 5607092, at *3 (Iowa Ct. App. Aug. 30, 2023) (further review denied Oct. 23, 2023) (finding “even if there were not sufficient evidence of provocation, the error would not be reversible as it worked to [the defendant’s] benefit”). We thus agree with the State that the “true issue here is whether there is substantial evidence that Williams committed second-degree murder.” The court instructed the jury that it could convict Williams of second- degree murder if the State proved: 1. On or about the 30th day of November 2022, [Williams] assaulted Rebecca Taylor . . . . 2. Rebecca Taylor died as a result of being assaulted. 3. [Williams] acted with malice aforethought. Again, Williams does not dispute that he assaulted Taylor. And as we concluded above, substantial evidence supports the jury’s finding that Taylor died as a result of being assaulted. The only question remaining, then, is 12 whether substantial evidence could support a finding that Williams acted with malice aforethought. The jury instructions defined “malice aforethought” as “a fixed purpose or design to do some physical harm to another which exists before the act is committed. It does not have to exist for any particular length of time.” The court instructed the jury that malice “may be found from the acts and conduct of the defendant, and the means used in doing the wrongful and injurious act.” The court also instructed the jury that “[m]alice aforethought may, but is not required to, be inferred from the use of a dangerous weapon.” Because malice aforethought is a state of mind, it is typically proved with circumstantial evidence. State v. Buenaventura, 660 N.W.2d 38, 49 (Iowa 2003). Viewing the record in the light most favorable to the State, there is substantial evidence from which the jury could have found that Williams acted with malice aforethought when he assaulted Taylor. First, the jury could infer that Williams acted with malice aforethought based on his use of a dangerous weapon. See State v. Jackson, No. 22-1543, 2024 WL 4370568, at *4 (Iowa Ct. App. Oct. 2, 2024). In her 911 call, Taylor told the dispatcher that Williams threatened her with a knife, and police found a knife in the kitchen sink when they searched the house. There was thus evidence showing that Williams used a dangerous weapon to threaten Taylor during the assault. Second, the jury could infer that Williams acted with malice aforethought based on the violent nature of the assault. See Deason, 2025 WL 3654120, at *3. Williams admitted that he punched and pushed Taylor, and her body bore injuries consistent with those acts as well as injuries “consistent with [there] having been some kind of pressure on her neck or neck compression at some point.” Third, the jury could infer that Williams 13 acted with malice aforethought based on his volatile relationship with Taylor. See State v. Newell, 710 N.W.2d 6, 21 (Iowa 2006) (“[T]he prior relationship between the defendant and the victim, including bad feelings, quarrels, and physical acts, is a circumstance that may be shown to prove the defendant’s state of mind and motivation at the time of the crime.”). The jury heard evidence that Williams had assaulted Taylor in a similar manner seven months earlier. And Taylor’s sister testified that Williams had recently threatened to kill Taylor. Bottom line, the evidence was sufficient to convict Williams of second- degree murder. The jury’s erroneous finding of provocation—under the voluntary manslaughter instruction which Williams requested—merely gave Williams “a break to which he was not entitled.” Taylor, 452 N.W.2d at 607. Williams has thus not established reversible error. See id.; Williams, 525 N.W.2d at 851; Rockenbach, 2025 WL 2058378, at *4–5; Flowers, 2025 WL 2234883, at *3–4; Maynard, 2023 WL 5607092, at *3. CONCLUSION Finding sufficient evidence to support the causation element and no reversible error in the jury’s finding of serious provocation, we affirm Williams’s voluntary manslaughter conviction. AFFIRMED. 14