Justia U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals Opinion Summaries

Articles Posted in February, 2012
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Petitioner petitioned for review of a decision of the BIA denying his application for voluntary departure. Petitioner was convicted for disorderly conduct involving prostitution under California Penal Code 647(b) and attempting to dissuade a witness or victim under California Penal Code 136.1(c). The court held that the BIA did not err in concluding that petitioner's conviction under section 647(b) constituted a conviction of a crime involving moral turpitude. Because petitioner was convicted of two crimes involving moral turpitude, he was deportable under 8 U.S.C. 1227(a)(2)(A)(ii) and the court denied his petition for review.

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Plaintiff represented a class of legal immigrants in the state of Washington adversely affected by its recent termination of a state-funded food assistance program for legal immigrants, which exclusively benefitted Washington resident aliens who became ineligible for federal food stamps following the enactment of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996, 8 U.S.C. 1601 et seq. Plaintiff contended that the state, by eliminating food assistance to class members while continuing to administer federal food assistance to U.S. citizens and certain qualified aliens, violated the Fourteenth Amendment's Equal Protection Clause and, by failing to provide class members adequate pre-deprivation notice and opportunity to be heard, also violated the Fourteenth Amendment's Due Process Clause. Because plaintiff failed even to allege that the State treated her less favorably than a similarly situated citizen of the State, her claim of alienage discrimination failed on the merits. The court agreed with the State that plaintiff lacked the concrete and particularized interest required for standing to claim a procedural due process violation. Consequently, plaintiff either lacked standing or would not succeed on the merits of her claims. Therefore, the court reversed the district court's order granting the motion for a preliminary injunction, vacated the injunction, and remanded for further proceedings.

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Defendant appealed the district court's denial of his motion to suppress evidence obtained during a probation search. Following the court's holding in United States v. Davis, the district court held that, to support the search, the officers needed only a "reasonable suspicion" to conclude that the probationer owned, controlled, or possessed an item within the probationer's residence. Defendant contended that the greater standard of "probable cause" applied in these circumstances. Because the court's holding in Davis had not been overruled and was not clearly irreconcilable with any intervening case law, the court affirmed the judgment.

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Defendant appealed from his conviction for conducting the affairs of an enterprise through a pattern of racketeering activity, conspiring to commit those acts, and committing violent crimes in aid of racketeering. Defendant contended that the district court erred when it failed to hold a competency hearing, sua sponte, to determine whether he was competent to stand trial. Based on the evidence before the district judge, including more than four years' experience with defendant, a reasonable judge in the district judge's position would not necessarily have entertained a bona fide doubt as to whether defendant had the ability to understand the nature and object of the proceedings against him and had the ability to assist in his defense. Therefore, the decision not to order a second competency hearing was within the district court's sound discretion and that discretion was not abused. Accordingly, the court affirmed the judgment.

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This appeal under 42 U.S.C. 1983 challenged Arizona's execution protocol, adopted as Order 710 of the Arizona Department of Corrections (ADC) on January 25, 2012. Plaintiffs, death row inmates in Arizona, claimed that ADC's execution protocol violated the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments. Towery and Moormann, two of the named plaintiffs with impending execution dates, moved the district court for a preliminary injunction against ADC's use of its current lethal injection protocol. The district court denied the preliminary injunction, and Towery and Moormann appealed. On the basis of the protocol approved in Dickens v. Brewer, as well as the State's undertakings as to the upcoming executions, the court affirmed the denial of the preliminary injunction, albeit on different grounds than the district court's denial.

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Petitioner was convicted in 1985 of the first-degree murder of his adoptive mother and was sentenced to death. Petitioner subsequently applied for a stay of execution and permission to file a second or successive habeas petition in federal district court. Petitioner claimed that both of his lawyers in state court failed to raise a colorable claim such that either one or both effectively "abandoned" him. Petitioner also claimed that he was now mentally retarded and could not be executed for that reason. The court held that, assuming Maples v. Thomas applied retroactively, petitioner could not make a prima facie showing that his postconviction counsel abandoned him within the meaning of Maples. Moreover, the court actually considered the merits of essentially the same claim in petitioner's first federal habeas petition. Even if petitioner could conclusively show that he was currently mentally retarded, the court held that the Arizona Supreme Court's decision was not contrary to or an unreasonable application of clearly established Supreme Court precedent. Accordingly, the court denied petitioner's request to file a second habeas petition and his motion to recall the mandate. The court affirmed the district court's denial of the Rule 60(b) motion. The court found that petitioner had failed to show a strong likelihood of relief on the merits and so denied his motion for a stay of execution.

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Defendant was convicted of murder and sentenced to death in 1992. Defendant subsequently filed a motion for relief from judgment seeking the opportunity to litigate the Eddings-Tennard issue as a new claim. Defendant argued that he should be permitted to pursue that claim, notwithstanding the statutory bar on second or successive habeas petitions, because his counsel had abandoned him by failing to present the claim in his amended petition. The district court denied the motion. The court need not decide whether abandonment by counsel could serve as an exception to the bar on second or successive petitions because, like the district court, the court concluded that defendant was not abandoned. Counsel did not engage in "egregious" professional misconduct or leave defendant "without any functioning attorney of record." Accordingly, the court need not decide whether defendant's attorney was negligent in failing to raise a colorable Eddings-Tennard claim. Therefore, the court held that the district court did not abuse its discretion in denying defendant's motion.

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Plaintiffs appealed the district court's denial of their motion for a preliminary injunction to stop the enforcement of the 2004 Amendment to California's DNA and Forensic Identification Data Base and Data Bank Act of 1998 (DNA Act), Cal. Penal Code 296(a)(2)(C), which required law enforcement officers to collect DNA samples from all adults arrested for felonies. Plaintiffs contended that the 2004 Amendment violated their Fourth Amendment right to be free of unreasonable searches and seizures. The court assessed the constitutionality of the 2004 Amendment by considering the totality of the circumstances, balancing the arrestees' privacy interest against the Government's need for the DNA samples. After weighing such factors, the court concluded that the Government's compelling interests far outweighed arrestees' privacy concerns and therefore held that the 2004 Amendment did not violate the Fourth Amendment. Accordingly, the court affirmed the judgment of the district court.

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This appeal arose in the context of a civil forfeiture action instituted by the government after it seized $133,420 found in claimant's car. The currency was seized from claimant's car as proceeds traceable to controlled substances offenses. Claimant asserted that the district court erred in granting summary judgment to the government after determining that claimant lacked standing. The court affirmed the judgment because the district court did not err in striking claimant's interrogatory response claiming ownership of the property and because the remaining evidence was inadequate to establish that claimant had standing.

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Petitioner was convicted of first degree murder when she was 16 years old for her part in the murder of her boyfriend. Petitioner appealed the district court's dismissal of three claims in her federal habeas petition as untimely under the one-year statute of limitations set forth in the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (AEDPA), 28 U.S.C. 2244(d)(1). Because the court applied the AEDPA statute of limitations on a claim-by-claim basis, and because petitioner's three claims challenging a state administrative agency's order were filed nearly 18 months after the statute of limitations expired, the court affirmed the district court's dismissal.