Full Opinion

IN THE COURT OF APPEALS OF IOWA _______________ No. 25-1360 Filed August 19, 2026 _______________ State of Iowa, Plaintiff–Appellee, v. Zayvon Brian Nix, Defendant–Appellant. _______________ Appeal from the Iowa District Court for Black Hawk County, The Honorable Patrice Eichman, Judge. _______________ AFFIRMED _______________ Martha J. Lucey, State Appellate Defender, and Theresa R. Wilson, Assistant Appellate Defender, attorneys for appellant. Brenna Bird, Attorney General, and Olivia D. Brooks, Assistant Attorney General, attorneys for appellee. _______________ Considered without oral argument by Schumacher, P.J., and Ahlers and Badding, JJ. Opinion by Badding, J. 1 BADDING, Judge. Does the speedy-indictment rule in Iowa Rule of Criminal Procedure 2.33(2)(a) (2023) apply before a defendant has been arrested? The district court held that it does not. We agree and affirm the court’s ruling denying Zayvon Nix’s motion to dismiss. *** On March 28, 2023, detectives from the Waterloo Police Department approached a parked car in an area known for drug activity. Zayvon Nix was the front seat passenger. One of the detectives recognized Nix and told him there was a federal warrant for his arrest. When an officer tried to handcuff Nix, he resisted and injured the officer. Nix was transported to the Black Hawk County Jail, where the officers intended “to complete arrest paperwork for interference with official acts with injury.” But the jail refused to hold Nix because of a medical condition. An officer contacted the United States Marshal’s office and was advised to transport Nix to the Linn County Jail on the federal warrant. A criminal complaint charging Nix with interference with official acts causing bodily injury was filed on April 11. The complaint requested an arrest warrant, which the district court issued the same day. Two weeks later, Nix applied for court-appointed counsel. The court granted his application, and an attorney appeared on his behalf. On May 2—while the arrest warrant was still outstanding—Nix’s attorney filed a waiver of his initial appearance. Nothing more happened in the case until almost a year later, on April 7, 2024, when Nix was arrested on the state warrant. Nix appeared before a magistrate for his initial appearance that same day, and counsel was again appointed to represent him. 2 The State filed a trial information on May 17. Nix then moved to dismiss the prosecution, arguing the State had violated his right to a speedy indictment under the amended version of Iowa Rule of Criminal Procedure 2.33(2)(a).1 That rule provides: When an adult is arrested for the commission of an offense . . . and an indictment is not found against the defendant within 45 days, the court must order the prosecution be dismissed unless good cause to the contrary is shown. For purposes of this rule, the 45-day period commences for an adult only after the defendant has been taken before a magistrate for an initial appearance or a waiver of the initial appearance is filed. Iowa R. Crim. P. 2.33(2)(a). Nix argued the forty-five-day clock for the State to file its trial information started running when he waived his initial appearance on May 2, 2023. The State agreed that the new rule applied. But it argued that even under the amended rule, an arrest is required. And because Nix was not arrested on the interference charge before he waived his initial appearance, the State asserted that the rule was not violated. The district court sided with the State, ruling: [T]he clear language of Rule 2.33(2)(a) states that “[w]hen an adult is arrested for the commission of an offense” then the 45-day deadline is triggered. (Emphasis added). After the arrest, the 45-day period is calculated either from the initial appearance before a magistrate or when a waiver of initial appearance is filed. The trial information in this case was filed on May 17, 2024, and was within 45 days of Defendant’s initial 1 Before the 2022 amendment (effective July 1, 2023), rule 2.33(2)(a) provided: When an adult is arrested for the commission of a public offense . . . and an indictment is not found against the defendant within 45 days, the court must order the prosecution to be dismissed, unless good cause to the contrary is shown or the defendant waives the defendant’s right thereto. 3 appearance after the April 7, 2024, arrest. Even though Defendant, through counsel, did waive his initial appearance back on April 25, 2023, Defendant had not yet been arrested on this charge. Nix asked the district court to reconsider its ruling after our supreme court’s decision in State v. Harris, 12 N.W.3d 333 (Iowa 2024), which he asserted expressly held “that the new rule requires the 45-day period to begin with the initial appearance and not the arrest.” Nix argued the rule was violated because he “waived his initial appearance on May 2, 2023 and a trial information was not filed until May 17, 2024, 381 days later.” The court denied Nix’s motion and clarified its ruling as follows: Rule 2.33(2)(a), even in the amended form, would not start until the defendant had been arrested for the Black Hawk County offense. . . . I’m not sure the original ruling was quite clear on that, so I do want to make that clear that I was applying the amended rule. . . . But the ruling, in the Court’s mind, is just that the defendant had never been arrested on the charge, he was in warrant status and no initial appearance had even yet been set to either waive or appear before a magistrate. The case proceeded to a bench trial on the minutes of testimony, following which the district court found Nix guilty as charged. Nix appeals, claiming the court erred in denying his motion to dismiss. Our review is for errors at law. See Harris, 12 N.W.3d at 335. *** There are two issues in applying the speedy-indictment rule, according to the court in Harris: “(1) In what cases does the speedy-indictment rule apply?” and “(2) If the speedy-indictment rule does apply, what event is the starting point for the rule’s forty-five day period?” Id. We are concerned with the first issue here. And as to that issue, the opening sentence of the rule— which was not revised in the 2022 amendments—plainly requires an arrest before the rule applies. See id. (noting that under its pre-amendment caselaw, 4 “the speedy-indictment rule only applies if two events occur: (1) the defendant is lawfully arrested by the police, and then (2) the defendant is taken before a magistrate”). As the court in Harris stated, “a speedy indictment is only needed when a defendant is arrested and subsequently held to answer by the magistrate following the arrest.” Id. (cleaned up). Nix concedes this point in his reply brief on appeal, where he “agrees with the State and the District Court that Rule 2.33(2)(a) requires an arrest followed by either an appearance before a magistrate or a waiver of an initial appearance.” The question now, according to Nix, “is when [he] was arrested for the purposes of the speedy indictment rule.” For the first time, Nix argues that he was arrested for the interference charge on March 28, 2023, so “the waiver of initial appearance filed on May 2, 2023, was the valid starting point for filing a timely indictment.” The problem is that Nix did not make this argument in district court, and the court did not address it. Instead, the parties seemed to agree that Nix was not arrested for the interference charge until the arrest warrant was served on April 7, 2024. At no point did Nix argue, as he does on appeal, that “he was in custody and effectively arrested on the state charge of Interference with Official Acts when he filed his waiver of initial appearance on May 2, 2023.”2 2 At the hearing on his motion to reconsider, Nix briefly challenged “the idea that he had not been apprehended” on the interference charge while he was in federal custody in Linn County. But that argument had to do with the effect of the state arrest warrant that had been issued but not served and whether there was a “hold” on Nix from Black Hawk County on that warrant. Nix did not argue that he was arrested on March 28, 2023—or at any time before the warrant was served on April 7, 2024—and the district court did not decide that question. 5 “Adding ʻadditional ammunition’ to arguments on appeal is one thing, but resting on wholly new arguments is another.” State v. Kapayou, No. 24-1216, 2025 WL 2058276, at *2 (Iowa Ct. App. July 23, 2025) (citation omitted). Because Nix’s arrest argument asks us to answer a different question than was answered by the district court, we agree with the State that he failed to preserve error on that issue. See State v. McClain, 20 N.W.3d 488, 495 (Iowa 2025) (“It is a fundamental doctrine of appellate review that issues must ordinarily be both raised and decided by the district court before we will decide them on appeal.” (citation omitted)). *** For these reasons, we affirm the district court’s ruling denying Nix’s motion to dismiss. AFFIRMED. 6