Background
In October 2024, the State of Iowa charged Kevin Charles Lind with human trafficking as a class “A” felony — carrying a potential life-without-parole sentence — after he arranged what he believed was a paid sexual encounter with a thirteen-year-old girl named “Destini.” In reality, Destini did not exist. Lind had been communicating with an undercover police officer who presented age-regressed photos of another officer and pretended to be a mother involved in prostitution. Lind arrived at a motel with over $1,500 in cash, expecting to pay $1,300 for sex acts with both the officer and the fictitious minor, and was arrested on arrival.
The State charged Lind under the alternative definition of human trafficking in Iowa Code § 710A.1(4)(b) (2024), which covers “knowingly purchasing or attempting to purchase services involving commercial sexual activity from a victim or another person engaged in human trafficking.” The State argued that because Lind believed he was dealing with a minor trafficking victim and her trafficker — and took substantial steps toward completing the transaction — the “attempt” language in the statute was satisfied regardless of whether real trafficked persons existed.
The district court disagreed and dismissed the human trafficking charge, reasoning that the statute required an actual “victim” (defined as “a person subjected to human trafficking”) and an actual “person engaged in human trafficking” — neither of which existed here. The district court also denied the State’s motion to reconsider. The State appealed, and the Iowa Supreme Court affirmed unanimously.
The Court’s Holding
The Iowa Supreme Court held that under the 2024 version of Iowa Code § 710A.1(4)(b), a defendant cannot be convicted of attempting to purchase commercial sexual services from “a victim or another person engaged in human trafficking” unless such a person actually exists. The court rejected the State’s argument that the word “attempting” imports the common law attempt doctrine — under which factual impossibility is no defense — and instead found that the ordinary meaning of the statutory phrase requires real people fitting those defined categories. Because Lind negotiated only with an undercover police officer (not a person “engaged in human trafficking”) and the supposed minor victim was entirely fictitious (not “a person subjected to human trafficking”), the conduct alleged could not constitute human trafficking under the governing statute.
The court grounded its conclusion in multiple interpretive tools. It applied the ordinary-meaning canon, noting that the phrase “attempting to purchase . . . from a victim” most naturally contemplates a real victim on the other side of the transaction. It also invoked the surplusage canon against the State’s theory: a companion statute enacted in the same 2012 legislative act — Iowa Code § 710A.2A, covering solicitation of commercial sexual activity — expressly covers attempts directed at “a law enforcement officer or agent representing oneself to be under the age of eighteen,” yet no parallel language was added to the human trafficking statute, even though both statutes permit liability through an “attempt.” Under the State’s theory, that express law-enforcement language in § 710A.2A would be rendered meaningless surplusage, a result the court declined to accept.
The court was also careful to confine its holding to the 2024 statute. It expressly noted that the Iowa legislature amended § 710A.1 in 2025 to add exactly what was missing: a definition of “victim” that includes “a law enforcement officer or agent posing as a person subjected to or a target for human trafficking,” and a definition of “human trafficking” that covers attempts to purchase services from such an officer. Under that amended statute, the court indicated, conduct like Lind’s would likely satisfy the definition.
Key Takeaways
- Under the pre-2025 Iowa human trafficking statute, the “attempting to purchase” definition in § 710A.1(4)(b) required an actual victim or an actual person engaged in human trafficking — the defendant’s mistaken belief that such persons existed was insufficient.
- The legislature’s decision in 2012 to include explicit law-enforcement-sting language in § 710A.2A but not in the human trafficking statute was read as a deliberate, meaningful choice that cut against applying a common law impossibility-is-no-defense framework to § 710A.1(4)(b).
- The 2025 Iowa legislature closed this gap by amending § 710A.1 to expressly cover law enforcement officers posing as trafficking victims or participants — making the outcome in Lind’s case unlikely to recur under current law.
- The court confirmed that the State could appeal the final dismissal order even though an earlier partial ruling went unappealed, because that earlier ruling was interlocutory and did not create law of the case.
Why It Matters
This decision illustrates a recurring tension in criminal law: whether statutory terms like “attempt” automatically incorporate the common law rule that factual impossibility is no defense, or whether surrounding statutory text can constrain the reach of that word. The Iowa Supreme Court chose the latter, finding that the legislature’s decision to enumerate specific classes of persons as trafficking victims and traffickers — and to add sting-operation language only to a neighboring statute — signaled an intent to require real persons, not imagined ones, under § 710A.1(4)(b). Prosecutors and legislators in Iowa and other states should take note that trafficking statutes targeting buyer-side conduct may need explicit language extending liability to undercover sting scenarios.
For defense practitioners, the case demonstrates the power of structural statutory arguments — comparing what language appears in one section of an act versus another — as a tool for limiting the reach of broadly worded criminal statutes. The court’s willingness to apply the surplusage canon and the ordinary-meaning canon against the government in a child-sex-trafficking context underscores that textual discipline constrains prosecutorial reach even when the conduct at issue is morally serious.