Any damage, defacing, alteration, or destruction of property is criminal mischief when done intentionally by one who has no right to so act.
Iowa Code § 716.1
Criminal mischief defined
Applied in 7 court decisions — leading case State v. Li-Yu Chang (1998)
Most recently applied in State of Iowa v. Marc Christopher Plettenberg (May 2018)
[C51, §2679, 2681 – 2683, 2686 – 2688, 2690, 2715, 2753; R60, §1766, 4319, 4321 – 4323, 4326 – 4328, 4330 – 4332, 4357, 4403; C73, §1564, 3897 – 3899, 3978, 3980 – 3982, 3985 – …
How often courts cite this section
Court decisions citing this, by year. The dip in the last several years is a data-coverage gap, not a real trend — our corpus holds fewer opinions from the most recent years, so recent citations are undercounted.
Official source: Iowa Legislature. Reproduced from public-domain Iowa statutes; confirm against the official source for the current text. Not legal advice.