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

Defendant appealed the district court's denial of his 28 U.S.C. 2255 federal habeas corpus petition based upon the Supreme Court's decision in Skilling v. United States, which narrowed the scope of the honest services fraud theory. Defendant,a former attorney and trustee of private trusts, pleaded guilty to honest services fraud. The government conceded that defendant was actually innocent of honest services fraud in light of Skilling, which confined the reach of the offense to cases of bribes and kickbacks. The court vacated the district court's dismissal of defendant's honest services fraud claim where no evidence suggested that defendant either engaged in bribery or received kickbacks. View "United States v. Avery" on Justia Law

Defendant, charged with two counts of Transmission of Threatening Interstate Communications and Transmission of Threatening Communication by U.S. Mail, appealed the district court's order finding him incompetent to stand trial. The court held that a defendant had a constitutional and statutory right to testify at his pretrial competency hearing; only the defendant, not counsel, could waive the constitutional right to testify; the district court had an obligation to admonish a defendant that his disruptive conduct could result in his removal from the courtroom and waiver of his right to testify; and the denial of defendant's right to testify was not harmless because the court did not know to what defendant may have testified. Accordingly, the court vacated the order and remanded for a new competency hearing. View "United States v. Gillenwater, II" on Justia Law

Defendant pled guilty to possession of child pornography. On appeal, defendant challenged the district court's denial of his motion to suppress. The court concluded, under the good faith exception to the exclusionary rule, that the search in this case was executed in objectively reasonable reliance on the search warrant. Because the court found sufficient ambiguity in the court's precedent, despite United States v. Weber, to confer a grant of qualified immunity in Dougherty v. City of Corvina in 2011, the court was foreclosed from holding that Weber rendered good faith reliance on the warrant in this case impossible in 2010; and defendant's remaining arguments were unavailing. Accordingly, the court affirmed the judgment. View "United States v. Needham" on Justia Law

Petitioners appealed separate decisions denying their 28 U.S.C. 2254 habeas petitions, alleging that their convictions were secured in violation of Batson v. Kentucky. At issue was whether a state court violated a defendant's constitutional rights by denying a Batson motion based on a prosecutor's credible explanation that he or she made an honest mistake in exercising a peremptory challenge to dismiss the wrong juror. The court concluded that it was not objectively unreasonable for the California Court of Appeal to affirm the trial court's Batson ruling on the ground that an honest mistake was not evidence of racial bias. Accordingly, the court affirmed the district court's denial of habeas corpus relief. View "Aleman v. Uribe" on Justia Law

Defendant appealed his sentence stemming from his plea of guilty to one count of being a previously deported alien found in the United States. Defendant claimed that the government implicitly breached the plea agreement by describing his prior convictions and including inflammatory language in its sentencing memorandum. The court concluded that, even if a breach of the plea agreement occurred, defendant had not established that this alleged breach amounted to plain error. Accordingly, the court did not reach the issue of whether the arguments contained in the government's sentencing memorandum constituted a breach of the plea agreement and affirmed the judgment. View "United States v. Gonzalez-Aguilar" on Justia Law

Plaintiff filed suit under 42 U.S.C. 1983 against defendants, alleging violations of his constitutional rights after prison officials discovered a letter plaintiff wrote to his fellow inmates calling on them to work together in support of his class action lawsuit against prison administrators. On appeal, plaintiff challenged the district court's adverse partial summary judgment order on his First Amendment claims. Pursuant to the Accord and Satisfaction, the parties agreed to withdraw all post-trial motions. Defendants also agreed to pay plaintiff punitive damages, plus costs and attorney's fees, and to expunge all records of the disciplinary charges. The Accord and Satisfaction encompassed the district court's prior summary judgment ruling on plaintiff's First Amendment claims. Accordingly, the court concluded that plaintiff's appeal was rendered moot by the parties' settlement agreement and dismissed the appeal. View "Jones v. McDaniel, et al." on Justia Law

Defendant appealed his conviction for being a deported alien found in the United States, challenging the district court's failure to order production of certain U.S. Border Patrol dispatch tapes. Without listening to the tapes, the district court concluded that defendant's showing of materiality was speculative. The tapes could have been crucial to defendant's ability to assess the reliability of the Border Patrol agent's testimony and to cross-examine him effectively. Moreover, the tapes were clearly relevant to defendant's location and the official restraint defense. Accordingly, the court vacated the conviction and remanded, concluding that the district court erred in excluding potentially exculpatory evidence. View "United States v. Muniz-Jaquez" on Justia Law

Defendant appealed from his conviction for making a false statement and obstruction of justice under 18 U.S.C. 1001 and 1512(c). In this appeal, the court considered defendant's claim that the district court gave an erroneous instruction on section 1512(c). The court rejected defendant's argument that the district court erred by not including the words "evil" and "wicked" in the challenged instruction on the meaning of "corruptly" and affirmed the judgment. View "United States v. Watter" on Justia Law

In his habeas case, petitioner, who was convicted of multiple murders, argued that his lawyer was ineffective in 1982 for failing to request a full-blown competency hearing. The court held that even assuming for the sake of argument that his lawyer should have requested a plenary competency hearing, petitioner nevertheless suffered no prejudice from the lack of a competency hearing because there was no reasonable probability that he would have been found incompetent to plead guilty. The court also held that the district court did not abuse its discretion in denying petitioner's request for discovery and a hearing on the claim that his counsel was ineffective in 1986 for failing to move to disqualify a judge based on senility. The court concluded that the judge was not impaired in 1986 and if the state supreme court had no cause to question the judge's mental status, neither did counsel. Accordingly, the court reversed the district court's grant of petitioner's habeas corpus petition based on ineffective assistance of counsel and affirmed the denial on all other grounds, remanding for the district court to deny the petition. View "Deere v. Cullen" on Justia Law

Defendant appealed his conviction for four counts of making false statements relating to health care matters. The court concluded that there was sufficient evidence to convict defendant of making a false statement relating to a health care benefit program for his communication with California officials under 18 U.S.C. 1035(a); the jury heard sufficient evidence that defendant's statements and concealment were addressed to Medicare; there was sufficient evidence that defendant knowingly provided false information to Medicare investigators in the form of circumstantial evidence sufficient to establish both actus reus and mens reus; the jury had sufficient evidence to find that defendant was aware the certified deliveries were not occurring and deliberately avoided learning the truth; the district court did not err in instructing the jury; the probative value of the admission of evidence regarding the scope of the fraud outweighed any prejudice; and because the court determined no plain error occurred, there was no cause to conduct a review under the cumulative error doctrine. Accordingly, the court affirmed the judgment. View "United States v. Ajoku" on Justia Law