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582 N.W.2d 515

State v. Gonzalez

Supreme Court of Iowa

Decided July 29, 1998

Supreme Court of Iowa · decided 1998-07-29

Good law ✅— No negative treatment on recordhow we know

Decided 1998-07-29

How this case has been cited

Cited by 9 later decisions — most recently February 2019

9 state decisions

50199820002010decided

Later decisions citing this case, by decade. The current decade is in progress, and our corpus holds fewer opinions from the most recent years, so the latest bars are undercounted — not a real decline.

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CARTER, Justice

¶1(dissenting).

¶2I dissent.

¶3There should be a limit as to how far a court must go in not acceptmg as true that which all others know to be true. This defendant was charged with four counts of delivery of cocaine and four counts of failing to affix a drug tax stamp to the controlled *518substance. The latter four charges each assert a violation of Iowa Code section 453B.3 (1995). The four drug stamp violations relate to the substances involved in each of the four separate delivery charges. The defendant pleaded guilty to three of the delivery charges and admitted to the presentence investigator that he was guilty of the fourth.

¶4This court accepts the fact that the sentencing judge could consider the fact that defendant had also committed the fourth delivery violation because he admitted this to the presentence investigator. But, it holds that the sentencing judge could not consider the concession made to the defendant in dismissing the four tax stamp charges (all class “D” felonies), which the sentencing judge declared “would probably be easily provable.”

¶5It is common knowledge that drug traffickers do not advertise their activities by buying the drug tax stamp mandated by section 453B.3. The unlikelihood that the tax was paid and the stamps affixed in these four instances is so great as to render defendant’s guilt of these four felonies virtually certain. I submit that the district court did not act improperly in concluding that the charges would probably be easily provable. I would not disturb defendant’s sentence.

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