Full Opinion

IN THE COURT OF APPEALS OF IOWA _______________ No. 25-1533 Filed September 2, 2026 _______________ Sergio Ochoa Pulido, Applicant–Appellant, v. State of Iowa, Respondent–Appellee. _______________ Appeal from the Iowa District Court for Henry County, The Honorable Clinton R. Boddicker, Judge. _______________ AFFIRMED _______________ Matthew B. De Jong, Rochester, Minnesota, attorney for appellant. Brenna Bird, Attorney General, and Adam Kenworthy, Assistant Attorney General, attorneys for appellee. _______________ Considered without oral argument by Greer, P.J., and Badding and Sandy, JJ. Opinion by Sandy, J. 1 SANDY, Judge. Sergio Ochoa Pulido pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and attempted murder in 2004. He is serving an indeterminate term of seventy- five years, and by statute he must serve seventy percent of that term before he can be considered for parole. Twenty years after he was sentenced, Pulido applied for postconviction relief and asked the district court to hold that the mandatory minimum is illegal. He rests his claim on New York State Rifle & Pistol Ass’n v. Bruen, 597 U.S. 1, 22–23 (2022), which set aside means-end scrutiny in Second Amendment cases in favor of a test keyed to text, history, and tradition. Pulido invites us to carry that test into Iowa’s constitutional due process protections and use it to unsettle a sentencing rule the legislature enacted in 1996. We have declined to extend Bruen that far before. We again decline to do so and affirm. BACKGROUND FACTS AND PROCEEDINGS In February 2004, the State charged Pulido with murder in the first degree, willful injury, attempt to commit murder, and a second count of willful injury. Pulido pleaded guilty to murder in the second degree, in violation of Iowa Code section 707.3 (2003), and attempted murder, in violation of section 707.11. The district court committed Pulido “to the custody of the Iowa Department of Corrections for a term not to exceed fifty years” on the murder conviction and “for a term not to exceed twenty-five years” on the attempt conviction. The court ordered the terms to run consecutively, leaving Pulido with an indeterminate sentence of seventy-five years. Both offenses were forcible felonies carrying a mandatory minimum. Under Iowa Code section 902.12(1)–(2), Pulido was required to serve seventy percent of the maximum term of imprisonment of each sentence before he could be 2 considered for parole or work release. Pulido did not appeal his convictions or his sentences. Nearly twenty years passed. In March 2024, Pulido applied for postconviction relief. He alleged that the mandatory minimum was an illegal sentence because it violated his right to due process and his right to be free from cruel and unusual punishment. Anticipating the three-year limitations period in Iowa Code section 822.3 (2024), he offered Bruen, 597 U.S. 1, as a new ground of law that could not have been raised within the limitations period. Pulido’s argument ran along these lines: (1) Bruen set aside the tiers of scrutiny in favor of a test keyed to text, history, and tradition; that method is not confined to the Second Amendment but governs constitutional rights generally, including the right to due process; (2) Iowa has guaranteed that no person will be deprived of liberty without due process of law since the constitution of 1857, but the mandatory minimum he is serving traces back only to 1996; and (3) because the State has no long tradition of requiring offenders to serve a fixed share of their sentences, Pulido reasoned, the requirement cannot survive the test. He adds that a mandatory minimum leaves the sentencing judge no discretion to exercise, so a defendant has no meaningful opportunity to be heard on the term he will actually serve. The State resisted, arguing that Bruen is a Second Amendment decision, that it does not disturb the settled rule that mandatory minimum sentences comport with due process, and that the legislature retains the authority to fix the punishment for crimes. The parties submitted the matter on the record. Neither side offered testimony. The record before the district court consisted of the court file, the briefs of counsel, and the exhibits. 3 The district court denied relief. It first concluded that the application was properly treated as a motion to correct an illegal sentence rather than as a postconviction action, so the three-year limitations period did not bar review. See Veal v. State, 779 N.W.2d 63, 65 (Iowa 2010); Dorsey v. State, 975 N.W.2d 356, 360 (Iowa 2022). Turning to the merits, the court gave two reasons for denying the motion. First, Bruen does not render a mandatory minimum sentence unconstitutional; its analysis addressed individual rights under the Second Amendment, see 597 U.S. at 26, and Pulido identified no case extending that analysis to a due process claim. Second, mandatory minimum sentences have been upheld against due process and other constitutional challenges, and the court was not free to set that precedent aside. See Chapman v. United States, 500 U.S. 453, 467 (1991) (“Congress has the power to define criminal punishments without giving the courts any sentencing discretion.”); State v. Cronkhite, 613 N.W.2d 664, 667–68 (Iowa 2000) (“There is no constitutional or inherent right to be conditionally released from prison prior to the expiration of a valid sentence.”); State v. Backes, 601 N.W.2d 374, 376–77 (Iowa Ct. App. 1999) (“The legislature possesses the inherent power to prescribe punishment for crime, and the sentencing authority of the courts is subject to that power.” (quoting State v. Iowa Dist. Ct., 308 N.W.2d 27, 30 (Iowa 1981))). The court concluded that Pulido had not carried his burden to show that his sentence was illegal. Pulido appeals. He renews his contention that the district court was obliged to measure his mandatory minimum against the text, history, and tradition test and that its failure to do so requires reversal. He does not renew on appeal the claim that his sentence is cruel and unusual punishment, so we do not address it. 4 STANDARD OF REVIEW We ordinarily review a claim that a sentence is illegal for correction of errors at law. But where, as here, the claim is that the sentence is unconstitutional, our review is de novo.1 State v. Lopez, 907 N.W.2d 112, 116 (Iowa 2018). DISCUSSION Bruen is a Second Amendment decision. The framework Bruen announced is a method for testing restrictions on the right to keep and bear arms; it does not purport to displace the settled body of due process law governing sentencing. See generally Bruen, 597 U.S. at 22–29. Even the authority on which Pulido principally relies confirms as much: Atkinson v. Garland, 70 F.4th 1018, 1022–23 (7th Cir. 2023) applied Bruen to a Second Amendment challenge to the federal felon-in-possession statute, not to a due- process claim. We have already declined to extend Bruen in the manner Pulido urges. In Cue v. State, we rejected a materially similar effort to invoke Bruen against Iowa’s mandatory-minimum scheme, observing that no court has expanded Bruen beyond the Second Amendment and that Bruen “is not a magic talisman reopening litigation of every constitutional right for prison inmates.” No. 24-1654, 2025 WL 1824647, at *1 (Iowa Ct. App. July 2, 2025). Pulido, like the applicant in Cue, offers no persuasive reason for this court to be the first to extend it. That his claim sounds in due process rather than the 1 As we noted in Cue v. State, No. 24-1654, 2025 WL 1824647, at *1 n.1 (Iowa Ct. App. July 2, 2025), this appeal’s “procedural posture begs the question of whether this matter should be appealable as of right or if certiorari should be required.” As we did there, “[w]e assume without deciding this matter may proceed as an appeal under Iowa Code section 822.9 (2024).” Id. 5 Eighth Amendment does not change the analysis; the defect is the same in both cases—Bruen supplies no rule of decision outside the Second Amendment. Iowa law is to the same effect. This court and our supreme court have repeatedly sustained the mandatory-minimum requirement of section 902.12—the provision requiring Pulido to serve seventy percent of both his terms before parole eligibility—against constitutional attack, holding that the statute does not violate due process, Cronkhite, 613 N.W.2d at 667, and that the legislature possesses the inherent power to prescribe punishment for crime, Backes, 601 N.W.2d at 377. The district court was not free to disregard that precedent, and neither are we. Finally, even setting aside these substantive obstacles, Pulido’s due- process argument is underdeveloped. He does not identify whether he raises a substantive or procedural due-process claim, and he supports the contention with little more than the assertion that Bruen controls. A party forfeits an issue on appeal by failing to make more than a perfunctory argument in its support. State v. Jackson, 4 N.W.3d 298, 311 (Iowa 2024). For these reasons, Pulido has not carried his burden to show that his sentence is illegal. The district court correctly denied relief, and we affirm. AFFIRMED. 6