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Supreme Court denies appeal in 2008 Charles City bar fight death

By Bob Steenson, bsteenson@charlescitypress.com

The state’s highest court has denied the latest appeal of a New Hampton man who was convicted of second-degree murder in a 2008 Charles City bar fight.

The Iowa Supreme Court had been considering the appeal by Richard Cortez for several months, but issued a decision on Friday that the appeal was denied.

Supreme Court denies appeal in 2008 Charles City bar fight death
Richard Cortez

The Iowa Court of Appeals had ruled earlier this year, in May, affirming the conviction of Cortez of second-degree murder in the death of Charles City resident Kenyon Armstrong as the result of a fight at what was then known as Tori’s Bar.

Cortez, now age 55, is currently serving a sentence of not more than 60 years in prison at the Iowa State Penitentiary in Anamosa.

According to court records, a fight erupted on May 17, 2008, between Cortez and Armstrong over Cortez wanting to dance with Armstrong’s girlfriend. Witnesses testified that Cortez stabbed Armstrong in the chest, resulting in his death, and also wounded two other people, Robert Luckett, then 17, of Chicago, and Cyrus Riley, then 24, of Charles City.

Cortez was charged with first-degree murder and two counts of attempted murder and two counts of willful injury causing serious injury.

He argued that he was only defending himself from an advancing crowd, but in April 2009 a Floyd County District Court jury found him guilty of second-degree murder, two counts of assault with intent to inflict serious injury and two counts of willful injury causing serious injury.

Cortez was sentenced to 50 years in prison for second-degree murder and 10 years each on the willful injury resulting in serious injury convictions. The district court ordered that the willful injury sentences are to be served concurrently with each other, but consecutive to the second-degree murder sentence.

In 2010, the Iowa Court of Appeals ruled that a willful injury causing serious injury conviction should be reduced to willful injury causing bodily injury and sent the case back to district court for resentencing, but upheld all the other convictions.

Cortez has raised several issues over the years, including that the identity of the person initially identified as victim Cyrus Riley and who had testified in court as Riley was actually named Barry Holden, who had a felony criminal record.

He also alleged bias by a state lab technician who performed DNA analysis on the knife used in the stabbing because she had posted racial remarks on social media regarding the Black Lives Matter movement and was later fired.

In each of those appeals, courts ruled that there was enough other evidence so that the newly discovered evidence did not meet the burden of being likely to have changed the results of the trial.

Cortez filed several other appeals and an application for postconviction relief, alleging violation of due process rights, ineffective counsel and prosecutorial misconduct.

The Court of Appeals decision in May denied all those claims and affirmed the verdicts.

The Supreme Court’s decision announced Friday denied further appeal in those areas.

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