The Iowa Court of Appeals has upheld the first degree murder conviction of a man charged in a Fremont County case. In Feb., 2015, Brian Heath Davis was sentenced to life in prison for the July 2009 murder of Holly Ray Durben, from rural Shenandoah. He had appealed his conviction based on what he claimed was insufficient evidence, improper evidentiary rulings concerning expert-opinion testimony and prior-bad-acts evidence, improper denial of his motion for new trial, and ineffective assistance of counsel concerning the recall of a witness, expert-opinion testimony, and prosecutorial error.

In it’s ruling the Appeals Court found substantial evidence in the record to support the elements of murder in the first degree, and they rejected Davis’s call for acquittal. The court also rejected his two other assertions, and concluded Davis’s trial counsel did not breach an essential duty by failing to object to the State’s recall of a witness or to the prosecutors’ statements during closing arguments. However, the Court said “because further development of the record is necessary to assess Davis’s ineffective-assistance-of-counsel claim related to the medical examiner’s opinion testimony regarding the location of Durben’s shotgun wound,” they preserved it for possible postconviction-relief proceedings.