A Marion County man acquitted of murdering his mother though he had been found liable for her death in a civil trial has lost his appeal of yet another case in which he contended that investigators violated his rights prior to his arrest.
Jason Carter was suspected in the 2015 slaying of Shirley Carter at the family’s rural farm house. After her death, his father and brother sued him for killing her, resulting in a $10 million jury verdict against him.
One day after that verdict, Iowa Division of Criminal Investigation agent Mark Ludwick filed a criminal complaint and obtained a warrant charging Carter with murder. This time, with new evidence and under the higher criminal standard of proof beyond reasonable doubt, Carter was found not guilty. Nobody else has been charged in his mother’s death.
Carter’s high-profile case has drawn attention from true crime fans and been featured by A&E Network and “Dateline NBC,” among other programs. In the years since his 2019 criminal trial, Carter has continued litigating the case, suing Ludwick and other investigators in state and federal court and appealing his family’s civil judgment against him. The Iowa Supreme Court has upheld his civil verdict and dismissed his state lawsuit against investigators, but his federal case, which has already gone through two rounds of appeals, lingered until a district judge dismissed all claims in March 2024.
Now the Eighth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has upheld that ruling. In a June 12 decision, the court found that investigators were entitled to qualified immunity, and that Carter’s claims either failed to rise to the level of constitutional violations or were not “clearly established” by prior caselaw.
Thursday’s ruling appears to mark the end of litigation related to the Carter murder, barring further appeals. An attorney for Jason Carter did not return a request for comment.
Court: Officers entitled to dismissal of all claims
Judge Bobby Shepherd, writing for the court, found that Carter failed to show investigators made “material” misstatements or knowingly omitted critical information in their warrant application.
“Under the totality of the circumstances, Carter was inconsistent with police officers and had inside knowledge about the crime,” he wrote. “These facts taken together are sufficient to support a finding of probable cause.”
More: DCI lied to agents, suspects about target of gambling investigation, lawyer alleges
Carter also accused investigators of sharing evidence with his family during their civil suit while withholding exculpatory information from him until he was criminally charged. But no prior cases have held police have a duty to share that information with defendants before they are charged, and the court found Carter could point to no case “remotely analogous” to his situation, meaning the investigators are entitled to the usual immunity granted to law enforcement officers.
And while Carter accused police of a failure to investigate that “shocks the conscience,” the court found no evidence they “purposefully ignored evidence suggesting the defendant’s innocence” in choosing which leads to pursue, as Carter claimed.
“At most, Carter has alleged ‘shoddy police work’ that ‘reflects nothing more than negligent or grossly negligent conduct'” rather than a constitutional violation, Shepherd wrote.
William Morris covers courts for the Des Moines Register. He can be contacted at wrmorris2@registermedia.com or 715-573-8166.
This article originally appeared on Des Moines Register: Jason Carter loses appeal in lawsuit against Iowa murder investigators