Matt M. Dummermuth

Matt Dummermuth, who was recommended for the post by U.S. Sen. Chuck Grassley, began serving as U.S. Attorney on Jan. 30, 2007. He succeeded Chuck Larson, Sr., who retired in December 2006, and Judy Whetstine, who served immediately following Larson’s departure, but soon also announced her own retirement.

“It has been a rewarding challenge to seek justice each day in each case for every defendant, every victim, and every member of the public,” Dummermuth said. “I’m grateful for the opportunity I’ve had to pursue justice and uphold the rule of law. It has been a wonderful privilege to serve and protect the people of Iowa.”

During his tenure as U.S. Attorney, Dummermuth, who is a native of Elgin, served on two national groups that advise the U.S. Attorney General — the Terrorism and National Security Subcommittee and the Child Exploitation Working Group of the Attorney General’s Advisory Committee. These subcommittees mirrored two initiatives within the Northern District Office that Dummermuth considered to be top priorities. He led an anti-terrorism effort within his office and closely coordinated with the Federal Bureau of Investigation and other law enforcement agencies. The office also enhanced information flow with, and provided international and domestic terrorism training to, law enforcement at all levels.

Dummermuth is also credited with implementing a strong prosecution and prevention strategy for child exploitation crimes. The office has charged and convicted record numbers of defendants for child pornography production, distribution and possession as well as for enticement and travel-related child exploitation crimes. In addition to obtaining lengthy sentences in many of the cases, including 100 years for one such individual, Dummermuth spearheaded two Internet safety initiatives, and often traveled himself to present safety information to area middle school students.

Although his office will be known for these and the traditional drug trafficking, firearm and other violent offenses that are the standard within all U.S. Attorney Offices, he will always be best known for his role in the prosecution of more than 300 immigrant workers from the Agriprocessors meatpacking plant in Postville. Dummermuth led the worksite enforcement prosecution effort following the arrest of 389 plant workers. Under his direction the office prosecuted 305 of the workers for immigration and identity theft-related charges within days of their detention in a highly controversial process that quickly became known as “fast-tracking.”

Nearly a year following the May 2008 raid in Postville and subsequent guilty pleas, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously ruled that undocumented immigrants could not be charged with aggravated identity theft without proof that they had knowingly used another person’s documents. Although the decision did not address the situation that followed Postville, it did effectively end what many feared was becoming an unfair government tactic.

In addition to the immigrant workers, eight other management, administrative and supervisory employees at Agriprocessors — including the chief financial officer, controller, and human resources manager — pleaded guilty to bank fraud, harboring, or document fraud charges. Just earlier this month, a jury in South Dakota found Sholom Rubashkin, day-to-day manager at the plant and son of the company founder, guilty on 86 of a possible 91 charges ranging from fraud to money laundering.

Although Dummermuth was recommended by Grassley and later nominated by Pres. George W. Bush, he never faced U.S. Senate confirmation. He and his wife, Rebecca, are expecting their third child. He said that he has no immediate professional plans for the future, and that he plans to spend additional time with his family and working on his parents’ farm before making any decisions.

Nick Klinefeldt & Stephanie Rose

Saturday, the full Senate voted on President Obama’s U.S. attorney nominees for Iowa, confirming Nick Klinefeldt for the Southern District and Stephanie Rose for the Northern District. That means that Iowa’s two U.S. Attorney offices will soon be under new management.

Although both incoming U.S. attorneys have taken some public criticism on the road to confirmation, Rose, who has worked for more than a decade in the Northern District as a federal prosecutor, was a common target of those who believed her role in the prosecution of several hundred immigrant workers at the Agriprocessors meatpacking plant in Postville tainted her recommendation to lead the office.

U.S. Sen. Tom Harkin, who recommended both individuals for their new jobs, said such criticism was misplaced, even while he applauded a judicial ruling stating the criminal prosecutions of the workers were inappropriate. Harkin’s confidence in Rose also recently received an added boost when U.S. Sen. Chuck Grassley noted how admirable it was to see a career prosecutor rise through the ranks of the Department of Justice and be recommended to take over the post.

Despite all of the concerns that have revolved around Rose’s role in the Postville prosecutions, she is most well known within the Justice Department for investigating and prosecuting Internet pharmaceutical companies. She will become the second woman in state history to serve as a U.S. Attorney, and the first Senate-confirmed woman to lead the Northern District office.

Both Klinefeldt, whose recommendation was of a more traditional political nature since he had previously served as a Harkin aide and attorney for the Obama campaign, and Rose will replace individuals selected by Grassley and placed before the U.S. Senate by then-President George W. Bush.

Matt Whitaker, who has served the Southern District of Iowa, was confirmed unanimously by the U.S. Senate in June 2004. Matt Dummermuth, who has served the Northern District, was appointed to the post by Bush, but despite being nominated for the post in December 2008, never stood for Senate confirmation.

Grassley, who sits on the Senate Judiciary Committee that unanimously approved Rose’s nomination for a full vote, said he would guess that her Senate confirmation is not in jeopardy.

“I’ve had a chance to interview her, and she’s been an assistant U.S. Attorney for a long period of time,” Grassley said during a conference call. “She’s absolutely qualified to do the job she’s been appointed to.”

Rose’s handling of any one particular case, according to Grassley, should not be used as a litmus test for her entire career as a federal prosecutor. He also note how unusual it is for someone within the office ranks to be recommended and nominate for such a post.

“Very seldom does somebody at that professional career track get selected by a U.S. senator,” he said. “They usually pick someone who has been not only a good lawyer, but also very active in the political process… I think it’s quite a feather in Sen. Harkin’s hat that he’d be willing to help someone who’s been a professional all these years to advance to be a U.S. Attorney.”

Scott Roeder (mugshot)

Leach has been pressing Roeder for months to use the so-called “necessity defense,” claiming even if he is found guilty it would open the door for future use of the legal maneuver to defend actions against abortion providers. In August, Leach drafted a legal brief for Roeder using that argument, which says a crime may be permissible if it is committed in order to avoid a much greater harm.

Leach produced a series of videos explaining why he believes the necessity defense is so important. The videos feature two young girls, surrounded by stuffed animals and pretending to be reporters, interviewing Leach about whether a “pro-lifer can shoot an abortionist and still get a trial of the only contested issue in the case by jury.” Leach’s hope is that by confessing to the all the facts of the case, including the murder itself, the judge will be forced to allow the jury to hear arguments on the necessity defense.

Leach even organized an online auction with the goal of hiring an attorney willing to argue that defense.

Judges across the country have uniformly rejected that argument, saying that since abortion is legal it is protected by law. Margaret Raymond, a law professor at the University of Iowa who previously practiced as a criminal defense attorney, told the Iowa Independent in August that the likelihood of a judge allowing this defense quite small.

“Typically, you don’t get to use that defense in murder cases,” she said at the time. “The problem with a necessity defense in this case is that it is hard to say that something that the law permits is an act that must be prohibited at the cost of death.”

Raymond says the argument could prove problematic for Roeder, since it involves confessing to a crime.

Leach could not be reached for comment.

Reitsma wrote two notes before shooting himself. One was to his family. The other was a four-word note to the bank’s local branch manager: “Welcome to the kill.”

When asked to picture farm life, many people envision idyllic settings similar to this fall plow scene painted by renowned Iowa artist Grant Wood. While such images are often accurate, they also obscure the real stresses that make up the daily lives of rural residents. (Photo courtesy Deere Art Collection)

Stories like Reitsma’s are becoming more frequent in states like California, Maine and Colorado. Experts say Midwestern states like Iowa are better prepared to deal with rural mental health problems, but the risks are still high.

“To farmers there is a real kinship with the land and livestock,” explained Dr. Mike Rosmann, executive director of AgriWellness. “Ownership of a family farm — sometimes a farm that has been in the family for generations — is the triumphant result of a multitude of struggles. Losing the farm or the livestock is viewed as an ultimate loss, one that brings shame to the generation that has let down its forebearers and has dashed the hopes of successors.”

The psychological attachment farm families feel for their land and livestock is one of the lessons of the 1980s farm crisis — a time when farmer suicides and rural violence made front page news across the nation. Back then, Iowa and Nebraska, two states severely impacted by the farm crisis, developed crisis hotlines designed specifically to serve the needs of agricultural workers. Today, in the wake of natural disasters and in the midst of economic uncertainty, the hotlines are experiencing a spike in activity, likely helping to prevent more tragedies.

The Sowing the Seeds of Hope program provides behavioral health services to uninsured, underinsured and other at-risk farm and ranch families and ag workers in seven states. Despite droughts, floods and ongoing economic challenges to family-sized farm operations, the suicide rate has not increased in states that have these services.

AgriWellness and Iowa State University Extension jointly sponsor the Iowa-based Sowing the Seeds of Hope hotline, which serves rural people in seven Midwestern states. It is the nation’s largest crisis help line for agricultural workers, and the calls are coming more often than they did even a year ago.

Though many of the calls the hotline has received from Iowa have been related to the impact of last year’s floods, Rosmann noted that, “More recently, we have seen an uptick in calls that are related to market prices for swine and dairy.”

“In addition to the 20-percent increase in calls [when comparing the first four months of 2008 with the first four months of 2009], the content of the calls is changing,” Rosmann said. “The callers are reporting much more severe economic turmoil, more mental health symptoms and significant increases in mental stress.”

In times of inclement weather — for instance, severe storms, floods or droughts — the hotlines experience increased activity. The callers in these situations, according to Rosmann, are distraught but do not have the “intensity” of the callers during tough economic times.

“You probably aren’t seeing as many [suicides] in the states, like Iowa, where we have hotlines,” he said. “The hotlines have the effect of reducing the isolation and they create a vehicle people can use to contact someone. We don’t have quite as many suicides in any of the states where we have the hotlines and have other additional support services. [We have heard] that there were two suicides reported out of North Carolina, where there is no hotline. The same is true of California — there is no hotline there — or in Colorado.”

The statistical evidence of suicide reduction creates a good argument, he said, for why Congress should approve funding for the Farm and Ranch Stress Assistance Network that was authorized as part of the 2008 farm bill. The network creates a national crisis hotline for rural workers and also mandates additional behavioral health services in geographically rural regions.

There is insufficient data that examines suicide by occupational group, but several studies have demonostrated that suicide by farmers differs somewhat from suicide patterns by urban residents. The table above illustrates how farmers, if they decide to take their own lives, often align themselves with the cycles of farming. (Source: AgriWellness)

Federal officials, including U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack, have signaled their awareness of the ongoing problem, but additional solutions may be hard to come by. “I’ve talked to farmers whose loved ones have committed suicide over this. I do understand,” Vilsack said during a rural community forum this week in Wisconsin.

Despite Vilsack’s recognition of what’s happening in rural communities, he said that he does not see many opportunities for additional federal intervention to turn things around. The U.S. Department of Agriculture, which recently approved $760 million in new farm loans, is considering restructuring loans and providing temporarily higher support payments, but ongoing discussions in the halls of Washington, D.C., will provide little comfort for agricultural families who field daily calls from creditors. Even if the idea is implemented, it is unlikely to be enough on its own.

Iowa has not yet seen the brunt of the burgeoning mental health crisis, largely because it remains ahead of the curve on rural mental health issues. The Hawkeye State not only provides an outlet for stress with its hotline, but it also offers follow-up care to agricultural workers who need it. The Iowa hotline has about 37 or 38 providers who have been contracted to give follow-up support to callers, Rosmann said. That means that Iowa residents need only travel 30 to 40 miles to access additional services.

“For many people that sort of distance is actually preferable because some don’t want to see a provider in their own town,” he said. “This usually has nothing to do with quality of care at local mental health centers, but has to do with the perceptions of what others might say if a family is seen going to the local facility or provider. So there is a perception of stigma attached to accessing behavioral health services, but that varies from person-to-person.”

In other states, rural residents tend to have more difficulty accessing mental health care.

“It’s a very complex picture,” Rosmann warned before beginning to explain the problems surrounding behavioral health services in rural America. “We have seen in Iowa the loss of psychiatrists and psychologists in rural areas. There just aren’t enough. But, we are better off than some other states. South Dakota is just terrible, and in Montana there just aren’t any psychologists and psychiatrists in rural areas. Residents there might have to travel 150 or more miles to get a court-ordered neuro-psychological evaluation because of lack of access.

“The numbers of appropriately-trained providers of psychology, psychiatry and substance abuse counseling in rural areas is half that of the same professionals in urban areas — and it is worsening.”

Further complicating the access issue for rural Americans is that there are very few medical educational tracks currently available that train health care professionals about the specific concerns that are often seen in more rural settings. And, outside of the rudimentary knowledge provided within those few agricultural medicine courses, there is no national curriculum in place for behavioral health professionals who intend to service rural areas.

“You simply can’t provide the information these professionals will need during a two-hour lecture,” Rosmann said. “We need a whole textbook and curriculum on agricultural behavioral health, and that is one of the things that we are now undertaking at AgriWellness.”

The organization plans to offer a six-hour course to professionals as a part of its upcoming biennial convention next month in South Dakota. Rosmann said that while recent discussions regarding mental health parity in conjunction with national discussions of health care reform are “a noble goal,” they don’t necessarily translate to actual access in rural areas.

“Having it on the books doesn’t mean that it is going to be adequately implemented,” he said. “I don’t know if it is a goal we are going to be able to achieve easily because parity requires the distribution of professional providers in ways that are quite different then where we are at currently. So, we are going to have to somehow get providers into the rural areas, and we’re going to have to change the reimbursement structure. Both of those are hard to change, but they are proper goals in my opinion.”

Eric Alva (left) and Antonio Agnone (right) speak out against “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” in Des Moines

Pictured from left to right: Eric Alva, Antonio Agnone, Alexander Nicholson, James S. Taylor, and Jarrod Chlapowski