Full Opinion

IN THE COURT OF APPEALS OF IOWA _______________ No. 25-1040 Filed November 4, 2026 _______________ State of Iowa, Plaintiff–Appellee, v. Christian Lee Jessee, Defendant–Appellant. _______________ Appeal from the Iowa District Court for Scott County, The Honorable Henry W. Latham II, Judge. _______________ AFFIRMED _______________ Martha J. Lucey, State Appellate Defender, and Melinda J. Nye, Assistant Appellate Defender, attorneys for appellant. Brenna Bird, Attorney General, and Joshua Henry, Assistant Attorney General, attorneys for appellee. _______________ Considered without oral argument by Tabor, C.J., and Schumacher and Buller, JJ. Opinion by Tabor, C.J. 1 TABOR, Chief Judge. “We was locked up n was cool but it’s different out here.” The State offered that text message from murder victim John Gilmartin to show that his once-cordial relationship with Christian Jessee didn’t last outside of prison. The State also offered a recorded jail call in which Jessee recalled having “no problems” with Gilmartin when they served time together. Those two pieces of evidence spur Jessee’s challenge to his convictions for murder in the first degree and three related offenses. Finding no abuse of discretion in the district court’s admission of the prior bad acts evidence, we affirm Jessee’s convictions. I. Facts and Prior Proceedings Jessee and Gilmartin belonged to rival gangs in Davenport. Jessee was affiliated with the West Side Mafia, while Gilmartin had been associated with the 26ers. That rivalry surfaced on June 4, 2023, when Jessee arrived at the house where Gilmartin had been drinking all day with friends. To greet Jessee, Gilmartin said: “What’s up, opp?” The gathering’s host said “‘an opp’ was like a new word that people were using” to describe the “opposition” or somebody that they didn’t get along with. The host found the greeting disrespectful and chided Gilmartin: “Hey . . . why would you say that? . . . I thought you guys were cool.” Gilmartin, who went by the nickname Bugsy, 1 said, “My bad.” According to the host, Gilmartin’s apology seemed to ease the tension in the room and the group continued to drink and use methamphetamine for what “felt like hours.” 1 Witnesses suggested the moniker was a “Bugs Bunny type thing” because Gilmartin liked rabbits. 2 As the night wore on, Gilmartin texted with his girlfriend who was upset that he was not home yet. He told her that one of the people at the gathering thought Gilmartin had shown disrespect and “upped” a “switch.” Gilmartin’s girlfriend assumed that he meant the person “pulled a gun on him.” She sent this sarcastic reply: “Glad to hear you staying out of trouble . . . .” Then Gilmartin explained that he and the person with the gun had served time together without problems but “it’s different out here.” When asked what she took that to mean, the girlfriend testified that “things were cordial when they were in prison together but now that they are not in prison anymore, there is problems.” Around 1:00 a.m. on June 5, Gilmartin left the house on foot, saying his girlfriend was going to pick him up. Soon after, Jessee asked the host for “a Swisher to roll a blunt.” When she said she didn’t have one, he told her: “I’m going to go get one, I’ll be right back.” He was gone about ten minutes, came back without a blunt, and left again with his female acquaintance. Meanwhile, Gilmartin was on the phone with his girlfriend, who recounted: [H]e said he was going to walk out of the house, basically just to drive to the location he had sent me and I would see him at some point when I was on my way there. And I would say probably forty-five seconds later I heard a big bang on the phone, John said, “Oh, shoot,” I asked “What happened?” He said “I just got shot,” and I didn’t hear anything else from him after that, so I abruptly left the house, called 911, and went to go find him. Gilmartin’s girlfriend found him lying on the sidewalk near the corner of Pine and West First Street. Police soon arrived, finding the victim “unresponsive, blue in the face, [and] kind of clammy.” He suffered three gunshot wounds, one at the top of his pelvic region just under his belly button 3 and another to his right shin; a third bullet grazed his left forearm. At the shooting scene, investigators found five nine-millimeter cartridge casings— all fired from the same gun. Gilmartin died from a lethal wound to his iliac artery, the major blood vessel that runs from the heart to the legs. Police obtained footage from a residential surveillance camera showing a blue Chevrolet Equinox, Jessee’s vehicle, traveling north on Pine Street at 1:20 a.m. Officers later found the Equinox parked at a trailer belonging to Jessee’s female acquaintance. Police maintained a perimeter at the trailer park, and around 12:30 p.m., they saw Jessee run from the trailer. As police were handcuffing him, Jessee tried to snap his cell phone in half. When police searched Jessee’s phone, they found incriminating messages. Less than an hour before Gilmartin was shot, Jessee texted a contact saying: “Kill a 26 right?” Then, around noon on June 5, Jessee engaged in a Facebook Messenger conversation with another contact, saying that he was in trouble and needed help hiding from the police and the 26ers. Jessee explained: “I just flipped on[e] of the[ir] homies.” When asked who he “flipped,” Jessee answered: “[t]his funny bunny.” The State charged Jessee by trial information with murder in the first degree, assault while participating in a felony causing serious injury, criminal gang participation, and being a felon in possession of a firearm. A jury convicted him as charged. Jessee appeals those convictions. II. Analysis Jessee raises a single issue: should the district court have excluded evidence that he had served time in prison? We review his claim for abuse of the district court’s discretion. State v. Thoren, 970 N.W.2d 611, 620 (Iowa 2022). We will find an abuse of discretion only if the district court 4 based its evidentiary ruling on grounds or reasons that are clearly untenable or reached its conclusion through an erroneous application of the law. Id. At issue is Iowa Rule of Evidence 5.404(b). That rule provides that “[e]vidence of any other crime, wrong, or act is not admissible to prove a person’s character in order to show that on a particular occasion the person acted in accordance with the character.” Iowa R. Evid. 5.404(b)(1). But “[t]his evidence may be admissible for another purpose such as proving motive, opportunity, intent, preparation, plan, knowledge, identity, absence of mistake, or lack of accident.” Iowa R. Evid. 5.404(b)(2). In a criminal case, the prosecutor must give reasonable notice of the intent to offer prior bad acts evidence at trial and articulate the permitted purpose for offering the evidence. Iowa R. Evid. 5.404(b)(3). The prosecutor satisfied the notice requirement. The notice provided that Jessee had “previously been imprisoned” and during that imprisonment shared a “cell block with the decedent in this case.” The prosecutor intended to offer the evidence to show Jessee’s prior knowledge of the victim, their relationship, and “to provide evidence of motive.” The prosecutor also alleged that the prior imprisonment explained statements in victim’s text messages leading up to the shooting. At a hearing on pretrial motions, the prosecutor also explained his intent to introduce a recorded phone call in which Jessee confirmed his incarceration with Gilmartin to prove their association and identity. Defense counsel objected to the reference to Jessee being “locked up” because it didn’t matter to the State’s case how the rival gang members knew each other. The prosecutor countered: “to say that they knew each other before and got along I don’t think conveys at all the nature of their relationship, which was even though they were rival gang members, in prison 5 they got along, but now that they are out on the streets it’s different.” The district court reserved ruling on the admissibility of the evidence. At trial, the prosecutor offered this text message from the victim to his girlfriend: “We was locked up n was cool but it’s different out here.” The message was explaining Gilmartin’s relationship with the person who had pulled a gun on him. The prosecutor noted: “Obviously the jury does not know at this point that Mr. Jessee was ever in prison before.” Defense counsel then acknowledged: [T]he State has made a showing that does inject some relevance to the past relationship between Mr. Jessee and Mr. Gilmartin as some kind of co- residents in a correctional facility at one time. And specifically that Mr. Gilmartin is saying that was then, this is now, things are different now that they are out. The defense essentially limited its objection to rule 5.403, asking the court to “weigh the probative value of this statement as it pertains to the overall case.” See Iowa R. Evid. 5.403 (“The court may exclude relevant evidence if its probative value is substantially outweighed by a danger of one or more of the following: unfair prejudice, confusing the issues, misleading the jury, undue delay, wasting time, or needlessly presenting cumulative evidence.”); State v. Sullivan, 679 N.W.2d 19, 25 (Iowa 2004) (equating the last step under rule 5.404(b) to the balancing test in rule 5.403). The district court allowed the evidence into the record, finding its probative value “far outweigh[ed]” its prejudicial effect. On appeal, Jessee concedes the identity of the shooter was the only disputed issue and the challenged evidence was “minimally relevant to the issue of identity.” But he insists that the State’s need for the evidence was low, while the risk of unfair prejudice was high. He also contends: “Learning 6 that Jessee had previously been in prison would likely enflame the passions of the jury and cause it to decide the case on an improper basis.” Assessing the admissibility of evidence under rule 5.403 involves two steps: (1) determining its probative value and (2) balancing the probative value against the danger of unfair prejudice. Thoren, 970 N.W.2d at 622. We recognize that weighing probative value against prejudicial effect “is not an exact science,” so “we give a great deal of leeway to the trial judge who must make this judgment call.” State v. Putman, 848 N.W.2d 1, 10 (Iowa 2014) (quoting State v. Newell, 710 N.W.2d 6, 20–21 (Iowa 2006)). The process involves considering how much the prosecution needs the challenged evidence to prove the fighting issues in a case, what other evidence the prosecution could use to that end, and how likely it is that the challenged evidence would prompt the jurors to decide the case on an improper basis. Id. at 9–10. Turning to the evidence here, the texts from the victim to his girlfriend—giving a play-by-play of meeting with the “opposition” and being threatened with a gun—were important to determining the identity of the shooter. Determining the shooter’s identity was the key issue. Jessee contends that the State had “plenty of evidence” to show that Gilmartin and Jessee were both at the gathering. But Gilmartin’s mention of being “locked up” with the rival gang member revealed why the renewed animosity outside of prison motivated the shooting. By contrast, a sanitized statement that Gilmartin and Jessee knew each other would not have painted such a clear picture. As the State argues, “none of the alternative evidence cited by Jessee had any bearing on the State’s establishment of Jessee’s possession of a gun at the party and the resulting inference that he was the shooter.” 7 The second challenged exhibit, Jessee’s jail call, tied up his identity as the person who threatened Gilmartin at the gathering. Jessee confirmed that he and Gilmartin were “in prison together and had no problems.” Other witnesses at the gathering did not testify that Jessee had a gun and suggested his encounter with Gilmartin was friendly, despite Gilmartin’s edgy greeting. The defense suggested the possibility of other perpetrators not interviewed by police. Those suggestions amplified the State’s need to show the distinctive prior relationship between Gilmartin and Jessee. See id. at 14 (finding State’s need to respond to claim of a different perpetrator “increased the probative value of the evidence”). The State’s substantial need for this specific evidence to prove the identity of the shooter supports its admission. On the unfair prejudice side of the fulcrum, we examine whether the two references to Jessee being in prison had “an undue tendency to suggest decisions on an improper basis commonly, though not necessarily, an emotional one.” Id. (citation omitted). We understand that knowledge of a defendant’s prior incarceration may suggest to the jury that he is a bad person and spark the “over-strong tendency” to believe him guilty. See State v. Walsh, 318 N.W.2d 184, 187 (Iowa 1982). But not every mention of a defendant’s time in prison will be cause for reversal. See State v. Johnson, No. 09-1776, 2010 WL 5050573, at *4 (Iowa Ct. App. Dec. 8, 2010) (no unfair prejudice where defendant’s prior incarceration “was only briefly mentioned twice”). Here, the State did not elaborate on the two references to Jessee’s incarceration nor did it rely on Jessee’s prior criminal past to show he was more likely to commit these offenses. The record does not reveal why Jessee was in prison, so there was no danger that the jury would convict him because he had engaged in similar conduct before. See State v. Martin, 704 8 N.W.2d 665, 673 (Iowa 2005) (finding no prejudice where the State did not introduce similar bad-acts evidence). After balancing the probative value of the evidence that Gilmartin and Jessee served time in prison together against its prejudicial impact, we cannot conclude that the district court abused its discretion. We thus decline to order a new trial. AFFIRMED. 9