Justia Idaho Supreme Court Opinion Summaries

Appellants were residents of Blaine County, Idaho (the “County”) who opposed a modified conditional use permit that the County granted to Idaho Power to install above-ground power lines. After the County denied Petitioners’ motion to reconsider as untimely, Petitioners sought judicial review of the permit in district court. Intervenor, Idaho Power Company, filed a motion to dismiss the petition, which the County joined, arguing that Petitioners’ underlying motion to reconsider was untimely, thereby precluding the district court from exercising its jurisdiction over the petition. The district court granted the motion to dismiss and concluded that it lacked jurisdiction to consider the petition because the Local Land Use and Planning Act (LLUPA) required aggrieved parties to file a timely motion to reconsider prior to seeking judicial review. The district court further held that no exception to the exhaustion of administrative remedies doctrine applied. Petitioners timely appealed to the Idaho Supreme Court to resolve the question of whether the LLUPA required a timely motion to reconsider to be filed in advance of a petition for judicial review. The Supreme Court concluded the act does require the filing of a timely motion to reconsider in advance of a petition for judicial review, and, therefore, affirmed the district court's order. View "Richardson v. Blaine County" on Justia Law

Stephanie Owens appealed a district court’s order affirming the findings of fact and conclusions of law made by the Ada County Board of Commissioners (the “Board”) in which it determined that Owens was an “applicant” under the Medical Indigency Act (the “Act”) and, therefore, required to pay reimbursement for the medical expenses incurred by her two children at public expense. In 2017, Owens’s children were involved in a serious car accident and suffered substantial injuries, which later resulted in the death of one of the children. Because the children’s father, Corey Jacobs, was unable to pay for the children’s medical bills, he filed two applications for medical indigency with the Board. Owens and Jacobs were never married and did not have a formal custody agreement for their children. At the time of the accident, the children resided with their father. The Board determined that Owens and her children met the statutory requirements for medical indigency. Although Jacobs filed the applications for medical indigency, the Board concluded that Owens was also an “applicant” under the Act and liable to repay the Board. As a result, the Board “recorded notices of statutory liens” against Owens’s real and personal property and ordered Owens to sign a promissory note with Ada County to repay the medical bills. Owens refused to sign the note and instead challenged the sufficiency of her involvement with the applications via a petition for reconsideration with the Board and a subsequent petition for judicial review. Both the Board and the district court ultimately concluded that Owens was an “applicant” and liable for repayment of a portion of the children’s medical bills. Owens timely appealed. The Idaho Supreme Court reversed: because she never signed the medical indigency applications for her children and she did not affirmatively participate in the application process, Owens was not an "applicant" as defined by the Act. As a result, the Board acted outside its authority when it ordered Owens to reimburse Ada County for its expenses and when it placed automatic liens on her property. View "Owens v. Ada County Board of Commissioners" on Justia Law

Following a jury trial, Travis Leavitt was convicted for statutory rape of a 17-year-old girl. He was 34 years old at the time of the incident. After the trial had begun, the State disclosed new evidence regarding Leavitt’s past criminal record, which the district court admitted. Leavitt challenged his conviction on the basis that the court allowed impermissible propensity evidence to be presented to the jury, including evidence of his criminal sexual history. Additionally, Leavitt asserted that even if the admission of such evidence were proper under Rule 404(b), the State failed to show good cause for its late disclosure of the evidence disclosed after trial began and evidence that he was a felon and a sex offender should have been barred as unfairly prejudicial under Rule 403. Leavitt’s appeal was initially heard by the Idaho Court of Appeals, which vacated his conviction and remanded the case for a new trial in an unpublished decision. The Idaho Supreme Court granted the State’s petition for review of the Court of Appeals’ decision. Though its reasoning differed, the Court reached the same result, concurring the trial court erred, and affirming the appeals court's outcome. View "Idaho v. Leavitt" on Justia Law

In April 2018, a teller working at CapEd Credit Union called the Boise Police Department to report a suspicious situation: a man came into the credit union, made a large cash deposit, exited the building, and then changed clothes in the parking lot. The man subsequently spoke with two other men in the parking lot. The teller reported that the men’s behavior made credit union employees nervous. Officers from the Boise Police Department responded to the credit union's call and detained one man in the parking lot. As the man in the parking lot was being detained, Officer Will Reimers arrived at the scene and proceeded into the credit union without speaking to the officers in the parking lot. As he waited for an employee to unlock the doors, Reimers observed two men, Patrick Maahs and Jordon Korona, standing at the teller counter. Reimers was dressed in full police uniform. One man left the counter and proceeded down a nearby hallway, then the other man followed. An employee informed Reimers that both men had gone into a bathroom, even though they were informed that it was a single person bathroom. Reimers took a position just behind a wall at the head of the hallway leading to the bathroom and called for backup. Once Maahs left the bathroom, he was subdued by police and eventually arrested on firearms and methamphetamine possession charges. Maahs moved to suppress the evidence seized from the search of his car on the basis that officers had conducted a de facto arrest and that his seizure was unsupported by probable cause or reasonable suspicion. The Idaho Supreme Court found the district court erred in denying the motion to suppress: Maahs was arrested without probable cause, and items found in his care should have been suppressed as "fruit of the poisonous tree." Maahs' judgment of conviction was vacated and the case remanded for further proceedings. View "Idaho v. Maahs" on Justia Law

BrunoBuilt, Inc., was constructing a custom home on a vacant lot in 2016 when a landslide occurred beneath the Terra Nativa subdivision in the Boise foothills. Following damage to the lot, BrunoBuilt filed a professional negligence suit against numerous engineers and engineering firms involved in the construction of the subdivision, arguing that they failed to identify preexisting landslide conditions and other geological circumstances that made residential development unsafe at this site. In the fall of 2018, BrunoBuilt discovered additional damage to the finished custom home itself. It then brought suit against additional defendants, including Briggs Engineering, Inc., and Erstad Architects. Briggs Engineering moved for summary judgment, which the district court granted. The court concluded that BrunoBuilt’s action was time barred by the two-year statute of limitations under Idaho Code section 5-219(4). BrunoBuilt appealed this decision, arguing that the malpractice claim did not begin to accrue until there was damage to the custom home, rather than just the land. To this the Idaho Supreme Court disagreed with BrunoBuilt’s analysis and affirmed the district court that BrunoBuilt’s claim was time barred. View "Brunobuilt, Inc. v. Briggs Engineering, Inc." on Justia Law

Jane Doe, a three-year-old child, was in the custody of the Idaho Department of Health and Welfare (the “Department”); she was six days shy of her first birthday when the State removed her from the custody of her mother and placed her with a foster family. Her mother’s attempts to stick to a permanency plan were inconsistent, and while for the majority of the life of this case, the magistrate court held fast to a permanency goal of reunification, it modified that goal in the summer of 2022 so that termination of parental rights and adoption became the primary goals for Jane and reunification became the concurrent goal. Mother appealed the district court’s change of the permanency goals. She also sought a permissive appeal from the magistrate court to appeal to the district court. The magistrate court granted the motion. The district court dismissed the case and remanded it back to the magistrate court sua sponte after determining it did not have jurisdiction to hear the appeal. Mother then appealed to the Idaho Supreme Court. The Supreme Court found no error in the district court’s judgment and affirmed. View "IDHW v. Jane Doe (2022-36)" on Justia Law

This appeal involved a dispute over ownership of one-third of an acre of land between two parcels near Slate Creek, Idaho. The disputed one-third acre was located south of a fence erected in the 1970s by the family of the current owners of the southern parcel, the Basses, and the predecessors-in-interest to the northern parcel’s current owners, the Esslingers. The district court granted summary judgment for the Basses, declined to take judicial notice of a case file from a 2006 quiet title action concerning the northern parcel, found that a boundary by agreement existed at the historic fence line, denied a motion to continue the summary judgment hearing pending criminal trespass charges against the Esslingers, and granted the Basses $107,134.32 in treble damages. After review, the Idaho Supreme Court affirmed the district court’s decisions. View "Bass v. Esslinger" on Justia Law

Kent and Linda Whitham, trustees of the Kent G. Whitham and Linda M. Whitham Revocable Trust, owned a property that benefitted from the use of a forty-foot private road easement that they and several neighbors used to access their homes in rural Bonner County, Idaho. Jeff Creamer owned a portion of the land that was encumbered by the easement. The easement consisted of a dirt road that was prone to erosion in the spring following snow melt and heavy rainfall. Because their property benefits from the easement, the Whithams took much of the responsibility for the maintenance of the road. In an effort to combat erosion, Creamer installed a French drain across a portion of the roadway that ran on his property. Kent Whitham then filled in the drain with dirt, rendering it inoperable. Creamer then re-installed the French drain. This back-and-forth conduct repeated itself several times and ultimately led the parties to district court in Bonner County when the Whithams sued Creamer. After a bench trial, the district court permitted Creamer to install a French drain on a portion of the roadway easement that encumbered his property and prohibited the Whithams from interfering with the drain. Both parties appealed. The Idaho Supreme Court affirmed the district court’s findings that the Whithams created an additional burden on the Creamer property and acted negligently when Kent filled in the French drain. However, the Court vacated the district court’s failure to award damages to Creamer to repair the French drain. The district court’s declaration allowing Creamer to install French drains across the portions of the Private Road Easement that ran through his property and prohibiting the Whithams from interfering with those installations, was affirmed. The Court also affirmed the district court’s failure to address Creamer’s common law trespass claim because the claim was subsumed by the negligence claim, and the trial court properly dismissed Creamer’s statutory trespass claim because Kent was within the easement when he filled in the French drain. View "Whitham v. Creamer" on Justia Law

Defendant-appellant Diwakar Singh was convicted for felony domestic violence. Prior to Singh’s trial, the State identified an error in the preliminary hearing transcript. The district court, citing its inherent authority to correct errors in the record, corrected the transcript after listening to the official recording of the preliminary hearing. Singh appealed the district court’s decision to correct the transcript and admit the correction as an exhibit at his trial. "Singh has not explained, nor can we perceive, why the magistrate court would be in a better position to correct the patent error in this case, which is clearly evident from the official audio recording of the proceeding. Under the circumstances here, where the district court listened to the official recording of the preliminary hearing and there is no genuine dispute between the parties as to what was said on that recording, it would add expense and delay to the criminal process to require remand to the magistrate court so that it could listen to the same audio recording a second time before the transcript could be corrected." The Idaho Supreme Court concluded the district court did not err in correcting the patent error in the preliminary hearing transcript. View "Idaho v. Singh" on Justia Law

John Doe sought custody of his daughter, Jane Doe, who was removed from the care of her mother in Idaho when a child protection action was initiated by the Idaho Department of Health and Welfare (“IDHW” or “the Department”). Jane Doe and her maternal half-brother were removed from the custody of their mother in December 2020 due to allegations of abusive conduct. Jane Doe had previously been removed from her mother’s custody in 2018 due to substance abuse issues. John Doe lived in Texas with his wife, who was Jane Doe’s stepmother, and their child, Jane Doe’s paternal half-sibling. At the time of the removal, John Doe was considered a “non-offending parent.” However, the initial “Adjudicatory/Disposition Report of Investigation” filed with the magistrate court noted that John Doe was listed on the Texas Public Sex Offender Website. The magistrate court exercised jurisdiction over Jane Doe in early 2021 and placed her in the Department’s legal custody. As part of the case plan for John Doe, the magistrate court ordered John Doe “to comply with and complete the approval with the [Interstate Compact on the Placement of Children (“ICPC”)] process with the state of Texas[,]” to assess the suitability of John Doe as a placement option for Jane Doe. The ICPC process ordered by the court included a home study and a placement determination. Texas denied IDHW’s multiple requests to conduct a home study on John Doe due to John Doe’s history, which included two prior sex offenses and a past child protection order, along with allegations of physical abuse, sexual abuse, negligent supervision, physical neglect, and medical neglect. Texas also noted that John Doe was a registered sex offender who had previously failed to register. As a result, John Doe never completed a home study. John Doe thereafter requested the Idaho magistrate court revise its case plan to strike the requirement he complete the ICPC process. This request was denied, and the issue before the Idaho Supreme Court in this matter centered on whether the ICPC even applied to John Doe as an out-of-state, non-custodial parent. The Supreme Court affirmed the magistrate court’s order modifying the case plan and held that by its plain language, the ICPC did not apply to an out-of-state, non-custodial parent. View "IDHW v. John Doe (2022-32)" on Justia Law