## Facts

- Edwin Bello Paredes lived with his partner, Cassidy Millard, and their two-month-old son in Coralville, Iowa.
- The infant was taken for medical care and later hospitalized and diagnosed with shaken-baby syndrome; medical evidence placed the injuries within a narrow window between late Friday and early Saturday morning.
- During the relevant time window, the infant’s caregivers were primarily Paredes and Millard, with only a brief period of care by Paredes’s sister.
- A DHS worker and a police detective interviewed Paredes and Millard; both denied knowing how the child was injured but acknowledged they were essentially the only caregivers during the critical period.
- Paredes confessed to causing the injuries and later recanted.
- After the confession, Millard spoke privately with a trusted social worker, stating she did not want Paredes “to take the fall,” describing Paredes as “nonviolent” and saying he did not hurt the baby, and admitting she had been overwhelmed by the baby’s crying, yelled at him to “shut up,” and began spanking him; she did not contradict the social worker’s apparent assumption that Millard had harmed the child.

## Issues

1. Whether Millard’s statements to the social worker were admissible as statements against penal interest under Iowa Rule of Evidence 5.804(b)(3).
2. What corroborating circumstances are required to “clearly” indicate trustworthiness when a defendant offers a third party’s inculpatory statement to exculpate himself.
3. Whether exclusion of Millard’s statements, if erroneous, was harmless.

## Decision

- The Iowa Supreme Court vacated the court of appeals’ decision, reversed the conviction, and remanded for a new trial.
- The court held Millard’s statements were against her penal interest and supported by corroborating circumstances clearly indicating trustworthiness under Iowa R. Evid. 5.804(b)(3).
- The district court erred by excluding the statements based on an improper corroboration analysis that functioned as a credibility determination.
- The error was not harmless because the excluded evidence was central to the defense theory that Millard, not Paredes, caused the injuries.

## Legal Principles

- A third party’s out-of-court statement may be admissible under Iowa R. Evid. 5.804(b)(3) when it is genuinely self-inculpatory and, when offered to exculpate the accused, is supported by corroborating circumstances that clearly indicate its trustworthiness.
- Corroboration is a screening inquiry into indicia of reliability, not a trial-level decision about the declarant’s overall credibility or which account is true.
- In assessing trustworthiness, courts may consider factors such as whether the statement is truly self-inculpatory (rather than blame-shifting), the context and timing of the statement, potential motives to fabricate, the relationship between declarant and accused (without categorical exclusion), and consistency with independent evidence.
- Erroneous exclusion of admissible defense evidence warrants reversal when there is a reasonable possibility the exclusion affected the verdict.

## Conclusion

The Iowa Supreme Court required admission of the mother’s self-inculpatory statements because they met the statement-against-interest exception and were sufficiently corroborated, and it ordered a new trial because the district court’s exclusion of the evidence was not harmless.


State v. Paredes, 775 N.W.2d 554 (Iowa 2009)