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

The State of Nevada sentenced Petitioner to die for brutally raping and murdering a 16-year-old in 1979. Petitioner pled not guilty by reason of insanity but was convicted by the jury after a trial in the District Court for White Pine County in Ely, Nevada. Petitioner argued that he is intellectually disabled and, therefore cannot constitutionally be executed under Atkins v. Virginia, 536 U.S. 304 (2002). The Nevada trial court found he was not intellectually disabled, and the Nevada Supreme Court affirmed. He filed a petition for a writ of habeas corpus which is subject to the restrictions of the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996 (AEDPA). Petitioner argued that the Nevada Supreme Court’s determination that he is not intellectually disabled is unreasonable under Section 2254(d)(2).   The Ninth Circuit affirmed the district court’s denial of Petitioner’s federal petition for a writ of habeas corpus. Petitioner argued that the Nevada Supreme Court unreasonably found that a 1981 IQ test was of “little value”. The panel wrote that first, the Nevada Supreme Court explicitly rejected Petitioner’s argument that the trial court had erred in crediting the 1981 IQ test over another expert’s testing. The second reason was that the record as a whole portrays Petitioner as a person who does not have significantly subaverage intellectual functioning.” Finally, the Nevada Supreme Court said that it “need not decide the relevance, if any, of” the Flynn Effect, which causes average IQ test scores to inflate over time, “and the necessity of adjusting the 1981 IQ score” because that test occurred well after Petitioner turned 18. View "ROBERT YBARRA, JR. V. WILLIAM GITTERE" on Justia Law

In these consolidated appeals, federal prisoners (collectively “Petitioners”) challenged the dismissals of their habeas corpus petitions in which they asserted that their incarceration during the COVID-19 pandemic violated the Eighth Amendment and sought release from custody. The district court dismissed the petitions for lack of subject matter jurisdiction, concluding that Petitioners were challenging conditions of confinement, not the fact or duration of confinement, and thus their claims did not properly sound in habeas.   The Ninth Circuit affirmed the district court’s judgments. Given Petitioner’s transfer from USP Victorville prior to the court’s review of her habeas petition, the panel addressed its jurisdiction. The petition sought relief in the form of release from USP Victorville and an injunction requiring that facility to protect USP Victorville inmates from COVID-19. Because the panel could no longer provide Petitioner’s requested relief, the panel held that she fails to present a live case or controversy, and Article III, therefore, prohibits jurisdiction over her petition.   The panel explained that Hernandez did not instruct federal prisoners to bring claims related to the conditions of their confinement under Section 2241; rather, Hernandez states that challenges to “conditions of a sentence’s execution” may properly be brought under Section 2241. The panel concluded the district court was not required to convert Petitioners’ habeas petitions into civil rights actions and declined the invitation to remand to the district court to perform this conversion in the first instance. View "JEREMY PINSON V. MICHAEL CARVAJAL" on Justia Law

Defendant was arrested after two officers discovered a handgun concealed in his vehicle. At the time of this encounter, Defendant was a registered gang member on California state parole and was subject to a suspicionless search condition that has been upheld by the Supreme Court. After entering a plea of guilty and preserving his right to appeal, Defendant appealed the district court’s denial of his motion to suppress evidence, arguing that the officers did not have advance knowledge that he was on parole at the time of this encounter.   The Ninth Circuit affirmed the district court’s denial of Defendant’s motion to suppress evidence. The panel held that a law enforcement officer must have probable cause to believe that a person is on active parole before conducting a suspicionless search or seizure pursuant to a parole condition. Consistent with case law and with general Fourth Amendment principles, the officer must possess advance knowledge of an applicable parole condition before they may detain or search a parolee. The officer need not be absolutely certain, with ongoing day-by-day or minute-by-minute awareness of the subject’s parole status. Instead, it is sufficient for the officer to find that the individual to be searched is on active parole and an applicable parole condition authorizes the search or seizure at issue. Applying this standard, the panel concluded that the arresting officers had probable cause to believe that Defendant remained on active parole when he was detained and searched. The panel further held that this encounter did not violate California’s independent prohibition on arbitrary, capricious, or harassing searches. View "USA V. CHRISTIAN ESTRELLA" on Justia Law

Petitioner, a Mexican citizen, petitioned for habeas relief after being held in immigration detention for over a year without a bond hearing. A district court judge granted Petitioner’s petition for relief and ordered the Government to provide her with a bond hearing on statutory grounds, relying on Casas-Castrillon v. Department of Homeland Security, 535 F.3d 942 (9th Cir. 2008). The Government appealed on the ground that Casas-Castrillon is no longer good law.   The Ninth Circuit vacated the district court’s grant of habeas relief and remand for consideration of Petitioner’s remaining constitutional argument. The court explained that t Jennings’s reasoning is “clearly irreconcilable” with Casas-Castrillon’s detention-shifting framework and held that Jennings abrogated this portion of Casas-Castrillon. Next, the panel explained that Subsection A provides the Government with authority to detain noncitizens “pending a decision on whether the alien is to be removed from the United States” and that Jennings provides that Subsection C authorizes detention during the same period as Subsection A, but does not define that period. The panel looked to Prieto-Romero v. Clark, 534 F.3d 1053 (9th Cir. 2008), and held that detention authority under Subsection A continues through judicial review. The panel held that the authority under Subsection C likewise continues through judicial review. Finally, the district court declined to reach Petitioner’s alternative argument that she was entitled to habeas relief as a matter of due process. The panel remanded to the district court to consider this question in the first instance. View "LEXIS HERNANDEZ AVILEZ V. MERRICK GARLAND, ET AL" on Justia Law

Petitioner filed the instant habeas petition in district court. In the amended petition, Petitioner challenges, among other things, the United States Parole Commission’s 2019 decision to issue a three-year “set-off,” the time he must wait until his next parole hearing. The district court for the District of Columbia transferred the case to the District of Arizona, where Petitioner was incarcerated. That court dismissed Petitioner’s petition as an impermissible second or successive petition under the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act and denied Petitioner’s motion to reconsider.   The Ninth Circuit reversed the district court’s judgment. The panel held that Petitioner need not obtain a certificate of appealability (COA) to appeal the denial of the instant petition because Congress did not define or include the District of Columbia Superior Court as a “State court” in 28 U.S.C. Section 2253(c), where it had expressly done so in that and other statutes. The panel held that Section 2253(c)(1)(A)’s language, “in which the detention complained of arises out of process issued by a State court,” does not include the District of Columbia Superior Court. The panel further held that the district court erred in dismissing the petition as an abuse of the writ when Petitioner could not have possibly raised the same claims in prior petitions. Thus, because no court has addressed Petitioner’s three-year set-off claims regarding his 2016 parole denial, he did not abuse the writ by raising the 2019 denial issue in his instant habeas petition. View "CLINTON ELDRIDGE V. CATRICIA HOWARD, ET AL" on Justia Law

A grand jury indicted Defendant on four counts, including one count of conspiracy to distribute methamphetamine, 21 U.S.C. Sections 846, 841. Defendant pleaded guilty to the conspiracy count. At sentencing, the district court found the Presentence Report (PSR) prepared by the Probation Officer accurate and correct and so adopted it. For the offense of conviction, the PSR calculated the base offense level at 32 based on the Drug Quantity Table set forth in U.S.S.G. Section 2D1.1(c). The PSR then found that Defendant had two prior convictions under Cal. Health & Safety Code Section 11378 that qualified as controlled substances offenses under U.S.S.G. Sections 4B1.1; 4B1.2(b).   The Ninth Circuit vacated Defendant’s sentence and remanded for resentencing. The panel held that Kisor is an intervening decision and is clearly irreconcilable with the holdings in Vea-Gonzales and Crum. Applying the traditional tools of statutory construction to the text of the guideline, as Kisor instructs, the panel concluded that Section 4B1.2(b) unambiguously identifies a list of crimes that do not include inchoate offenses. Because Section 4B1.2(b)’s definition of “controlled substance offense” is unambiguous, the Supreme Court’s decision in Kisor now makes it impermissible to defer to Application Note 1 to determine whether conspiracy fits into this definition. Because the text of Section 4B1.2(b) unambiguously does not include inchoate offenses, and because the court is no longer permitted to rely on the commentary of an unambiguous guideline after Kisor, the panel held that Defendant’s conspiracy conviction is not a “controlled substance offense” under Section 4B1.1. View "USA V. ROBERTO CASTILLO" on Justia Law

Petitioner was sentenced to death in 1991 after a California state jury convicted him of robbery, burglary, and felony murder. He appealed the district court’s denial of his federal habeas corpus petition filed pursuant to 28 U.S.C. Section 2254. Petitioner raised several certified claims, including claims that the prosecutor knowingly used false and misleading testimony in violation of Napue v. Illinois, 360 U.S. 264 (1959), and failed to disclose favorable material evidence in violation of Brady v. Maryland, 373 U.S. 83 (1963).   The Ninth Circuit reversed and remanded to the district court with instructions to grant a conditional writ of habeas corpus as to the special-circumstances findings and the imposition of the death penalty and affirmed the district court’s holding as to Petitioner’s certified guilt-phase claims. The panel wrote that this is an exceptional case in which the prosecutor deliberately elicited, and then failed to correct, false and misleading testimony from the State’s star witness. The prosecutor went on to exploit the witness’s false testimony in his closing argument. He also failed to produce evidence to the defense team that would have seriously impeached the witness’s testimony. The panel wrote that the record makes clear that the State’s special-circumstances evidence depended on the witness’s testimony. Reviewing under the deferential standard afforded to state-court decisions by the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (AEDPA), the panel concluded it was objectively unreasonable for the state court to decide that the prosecutor’s misconduct was immaterial to the jury’s special circumstances findings. View "COLIN DICKEY V. RON DAVIS" on Justia Law

Defendant was convicted by a jury of sixteen counts of attempted sexual exploitation of a minor under 18 U.S.C. Section 2251(a) and one count of possession of child pornography under 18 U.S.C. Section 2252A(a)(5)(B). At trial, the jury heard extensive evidence that Defendant placed a hidden camera in his bathroom with the purpose of secretly recording and amassing a collection of nude videos of his then fourteen-year-old stepdaughter. Defendant asserts there was insufficient evidence to sustain his convictions, arguing on appeal (1) that he did not “use” his stepdaughter in a way that violates Section 2251(a) and (2) that the videos did not depict “sexually explicit conduct,” as defined by 18 U.S.C. Section 2256(2)(A)(v), which applies to both Sections 2251(a) and 2252A.   The Ninth Circuit affirmed. The panel concluded that the district court did not clearly err in finding that the videos reasonably fell within the definition of sexually explicit conduct. The panel wrote that the district court did not clearly err in determining that a reasonable jury could find (1) that the focal point of the videos was on T.A.’s genitals or pubic area, (2) that T.A. is fully nude in the videos, and (3) that the videos were intended or designed to elicit a sexual response in the viewer. The panel reached the same result under a de novo review of the sufficiency of the evidence. View "USA V. TEL BOAM" on Justia Law

The Ninth Circuit denied a petition for panel rehearing and denied on behalf of the court a petition for rehearing en banc in a case in which the panel held that federal courts lack jurisdiction to review the discretionary determination that a particular noncitizen in immigration detention poses a danger to the community, and so is not entitled to release on bond. Judge Berzon, joined by Chief Judge Murguia and Judges Wardlaw, W. Fletcher, Paez, Christen, Hurwitz, Koh, Sung, Mendoza, and Desai, disagreed with the Court’s refusal to reconsider the panel opinion en banc. View "JAVIER MARTINEZ V. LOWELL CLARK, ET AL" on Justia Law

Defendant was indicted for possessing a Jimenez Arms .380 semiautomatic handgun in violation of the felon in possession of a firearm statute. He was not tried until August 30, 2021— 557 days after his indictment—largely because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Over Defendant’s objection, the district court excluded much of this time from Defendant’s Speedy Trial Act calculation using the “ends of justice” provision of the Act, 18 U.S.C. Section 3161(h)(7)(A), and as a result, denied Defendant’s Sixth Amendment and Speedy Trial Act motions to dismiss his indictment. At trial, the district court rejected Defendant’s request for a jury instruction requiring the jury to find that he knew that the handgun he possessed had traveled in interstate commerce. Defendant appealed both the speedy-trial and jury instruction issues.   The Ninth Circuit affirmed. The panel held that the district court properly excluded time under the ends of justice provision. The panel held that the non-exhaustive factors set forth in United States v. Olsen, 21 F.4th 1036 (9th Cir. 2022), support the district court’s exclusion of time and that the district court did not err in its ends of justice determination. The panel wrote that the district court acted commendably in doing its best to balance speedy trial rights and public safety in the face of what is hopefully a once-in-a-lifetime pandemic. The panel held that the district court did not err by refusing to give Defendant’s requested mens rea instruction. The panel rejected his challenge to the revocation of supervised release. View "USA V. TOMMY WALKER" on Justia Law