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

Oregon's Measure 37 required state and local governments to compensate private property owners for the reduction in the fair market value of their real property that resulted from any land use regulations of those governmental entities that restricted the use of the subject properties. In this consolidated appeal, at issue was whether Oregon committed a constitutional taking, violated plaintiffs' due process rights, or violated plaintiffs' equal protection rights when Oregon voters enacted Measure 49 to replace and modify remedies available under the previous Measure 37. The court concluded that Oregon did not commit a constitutional taking when it modified Measure 37, because any potential property interest that plaintiffs had for compensation or a specific type of land use under Measure 37 had not vested. Measure 49 also did not contravene substantive due process because it did not implicate fundamental rights. For this reason, and also because the regulatory classification under Measure 49 was not based on a suspect class, Measure 49 survived rational basis scrutiny and had not violated plaintiffs' equal protection rights. Therefore, the court affirmed the district court.

The prosecutor in this case, Assistant U.S. Attorney Jerry R. Albert, accused defendant of having lied to the federal magistrate presiding at an earlier hearing. Without telling the court or defense counsel, the prosecutor presented to court and counsel an altered version of the prior hearing's question and answer and the altered version of such dialogue made it appear as though defendant had contradicted herself on a material point, when she plainly had not. When the prosecutor's misrepresentation was discovered by defense counsel, he moved for a mistrial, which the court swiftly granted. Defendant then moved to dismiss the indictment with prejudice, on double jeopardy grounds, but the district court denied that motion. The court affirmed the district court's denial of the motion where the defense had consented to a mistrial and there was no evidence that the prosecution was attempting to "goad" the defense into making the mistrial request -rather, the evidence revealed that this was a case of a prosecutor crossing the line an an attempt to "win at all costs." In addition, the court took several steps to ensure that the prosecutor's actions were properly investigated and that he was disciplined if the relevant authorities deemed it proper.

This case involved an Oregon statute which adopted a special statute of limitations for abuse victims. Under the statute, an action must be commenced before the person reached age 40 or within five years of discovery of the causal connection between the abuse and the injury. At issue was the effect of this statute on plaintiff's federal civil rights claim under 42 U.S.C. 1983 that he was beaten by teachers at his elementary school from 1986-1988. The court concluded that Oregon's general statute of limitations, rather than the specialized abuse statute, governed plaintiff's claims and that federal, not state law, governed accrual of his claims.

Defendant appealed the sentence imposed after he pled guilty to being a deported alien found in the United States. Defendant contended that the government breached the plea agreement, notwithstanding the government's later admission that it made a mistake in its initial sentencing recommendation and its substitution of the recommendation to which defendant and the government had agreed in the plea agreement. The court vacated and remanded for resentencing, holding that the government breached the plea agreement and the sentence must be vacated to give defendant the benefit of his bargain, specific performance on the plea agreement.

Defendant was convicted of six counts of mailing threatening communications where he addressed four envelopes to media outlets and two to music-related websites. In the envelopes, defendant allegedly threatened to shoot people outside of the University of Phoenix Stadium in Glendale, Arizona, site of Super Bowl XLII. Defendant eventually had a change of heart and turned himself into law enforcement. At issue was the meaning of "person" and of "addressed to" in 18 U.S.C. 876(c), which prohibited the mailing of communications "addressed to any other person and containing any threat to kidnap any person or any threat to injure the person of the addressee or of another." The court held that section 876(c) referred exclusively to an individual, or to a natural, person. Therefore, the statute required that the threatening communications be addressed to a natural person. The court also held that in order to identify the addressee, a court was not limited to the directions for delivery on the outside of the envelope or on the packaging, but also could look to the content of the communications. Because defendant's communications were not addressed to natural persons, the court reversed.

Defendant appealed from the district court's denial of his motion to suppress 700 Oxycodone pills found in his underwear after a warrantless search by officers in the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport. At issue was the scope of a voluntary consent to search at an airport. The court concluded that defendant voluntarily consented to a search of his person, and that the arresting officer's full-body pat-down including the groin area outside defendant's pants, was reasonable and did not exceed his consent. Accordingly, the court affirmed the district court's denial of the motion to suppress.

Defendant, a Mexican national, was convicted of two counts of illegal entry and subsequently appealed the district court's application of a sixteen-level sentencing enhancement pursuant to U.S.S.G. 2L1.2(b). Because defendant's original removal order improperly waived his right to judicial review, the court held that the district court erred when it applied the sentencing enhancement under section 2L.1.2(b) and thus committed procedural error by incorrectly calculating his Guidelines range. Therefore, the court vacated defendant's sentence and remanded for resentencing.

Plaintiff, a continuing political committee, alleged that three provisions of Washington election law violated the First Amendment as applied to ballot measure committees. The court held that Washington's disclosure requirements, Washington Revised Code, 42.17.090, and Washington Administrative Code 390-16-034, which required these committees to disclose the name and address of contributors giving more than $25, and additionally to disclose the employer and occupation of contributors giving more than $100, survived exacting scrutiny because they were substantially related to the important governmental interest in informing the electorate. The court held that Washington Revised Code 42.17.105(8), which prohibited a political committee from accepting from any one person contributions exceeding $5,000 within 21 days of a general election, was not closely drawn to achieve the state's important interest in informing the electorate. Therefore, section 42.17.105(8) was therefore unconstitutional as applied to ballot measure committees. Accordingly, the court affirmed the judgment of the district court.

This case arose from claims that the federal government, with the assistance of major telecommunications companies, engaged in widespread warrantless eavesdropping in the United States following the September 11, 2001 attacks. At issue was whether plaintiffs have standing to bring their statutory and constitutional claims against the government for what they described as a communications dragnet of ordinary American citizens. The court concluded that plaintiffs' claims were not abstract, generalized grievances and instead met the constitutional standing requirement of concrete injury; nor do prudential considerations bar the action; the claims did not raise a political question nor are they inappropriate for judicial resolution; and the court did not impose a heightened standing requirement simply because the case involved government officials in the national security context. Accordingly, the court reversed the district court's dismissal on standing grounds and remanded for further proceedings.

Plaintiffs appealed from the district court's dismissal of their complaint against government officials and a group of telecommunications companies. Plaintiffs challenged section 802 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), 50 U.S.C. 1885a, as an unconstitutional taking under the Fifth Amendment. Section 802 allowed the U.S. Attorney General to certify that a telecommunications company provided assistance at the behest of the government in connection with investigation of terrorism, thereby triggering immunity on the theory that application of section 802 required dismissal of plaintiffs' case and negated the cause of action under various federal statutes. The court held that the district court correctly dismissed plaintiffs' complaint for lack of jurisdiction where plaintiffs demanded no monetary damages. Consequently, the court need not reach the merits of the Takings Clause claim.