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

Landon Wynar, a sophomore high school student, was suspended from school after he made a string of increasingly violent and threatening instant messages sent from home to his friends. Landon and his father sued the school district and others (collectively, "Douglas County") for violations of Landon's constitutional rights under 42 U.S.C. 1983, as well as for negligence and negligent infliction of emotional distress. The court held that, when faced with an identifiable threat of school violence, schools could take disciplinary action in response to off-campus speech that met the requirements of Tinker v. DesMoines. In this instance, the court concluded that it was reasonable for Douglas County to interpret the messages as a real risk and to forecast a substantial disruption. Further, Landon's messages threatening the student body as a whole, and targeted specific students by name, impinged on the rights of the students to be secure and to be let alone. Accordingly, the court held that Douglas County's actions did not violate the First Amendment. The court also held that Landon received adequate due process before both his 10-day suspension and his 90-day expulsion. The court rejected plaintiffs' remaining claims and affirmed the district court's grant of summary judgment for the school district. View "Wynar v. Douglas Cnty. Sch. Dist." on Justia Law

Petitioner was convicted of felony murder after he and his girlfriend robbed the house of her stepmother. After they left the stepmother hogtied and face-down with a sheet taped around her head, the stepmother was not breathing and had no pulse when police arrived. Petitioner argued that the "logical nexus" requirement between the robbery and the death was unconstitutionally vague, that its application in his case was unconstitutionally retroactive, and that the trial court's evidentiary rulings and jury instructions violated his constitutional rights. The court rejected petitioner's void-for-vagueness argument, concluding that there was a clear connection between the felony petitioner set out to commit and the stepmother's subsequent death. The court also concluded that petitioner was unable to identify any California case actually absolving a criminal defendant of felony murder for a killing done by his accomplice during a felony but not in furtherance of a felony. Accordingly, the California Supreme Court's decision was not an unreasonable application of clearly established federal law. Because there was a clear logical nexus between petitioner's crime and the stepmother's death, failure to instruct the jury on the required connection could not have prejudiced petitioner. The court rejected petitioner's remaining claims and affirmed the district court's denial of petitioner 28 U.S.C. 2254 habeas corpus petition. View "Cavitt v. Cullen" on Justia Law

Plaintiffs sought to enjoin enforcement of Senate Bill 1172, which banned state-licensed mental health providers from engaging in "sexual orientation change efforts" ("SOCE") with patients under 18 years of age, because it violated the First Amendment and infringed on several other constitutional rights. Undertaking plenary review, the court held that SB 1172 was a regulation of professional conduct and, therefore, did not violate the free speech rights of SOCE practitioners or minor patients under rational basis review. The court also held that the statute was neither vague nor overbroad and did not violate parents' fundamental rights. Accordingly, the court reversed the order granting preliminary relief in Case No. 13-15023 and affirmed the denial of preliminary relief in Case No. 12-17681. View "Pickup, et al. v. Brown, Jr., et al." on Justia Law

Applicants sought a four-month exemption from the per page Public Access to Court Electronic Records (PACER) system fee. At issue was whether the court had jurisdiction to review the district court's administrative order denying the exemption. The court held that 28 U.S.C. 1291 necessarily refers to final decisions of a judicial character, not to administrative actions outside the scope of the litigative function. Because the order denying applicants a PACER fee exemption came before the court strictly in an administrative context, the court could not review under section 1291. Accordingly, the court dismissed the appeal for lack of appellate jurisdiction. View "In re: Application for Exemption from Electronic Public Access Fees" on Justia Law

This case concerned Hawaii's "Act 163," Haw. Rev. Stat. 302A-1134(c), which barred students from attending public school after the last day of the school year in which they turned 20. At issue was whether state-funded high school diploma programs for adults who never graduated from high school were a form of "public education" under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), 20 U.S.C. 1412(a)(1)(B)(I). The Community Schools for Adults offers "free public education" to students who did not require IDEA services. The Department offers, at taxpayer expense, the opportunity for nondisabled 20- and 21-year-olds to complete their secondary educations and earn high school diplomas. Providing IDEA services to disabled children of those ages would therefore be consistent with "State law or practice... respecting the provision of public education," so the state must do so. Accordingly, the court reversed the district court's judgment for the State on the IDEA claim, holding that Act 163 violated federal law. The court affirmed the district court's judgment on plaintiffs' remaining claims. View "E.R.K. v. State of Hawaii Dep't of Educ." on Justia Law

Defendant appealed his sentence after pleading guilty to investment fraud. The district court ordered defendant to pay restitution pursuant to the Mandatory Victims Restitution Act of 1996 (MVRA), 18 U.S.C. 3663A. The court concluded that the district court abused its discretion in including a certain sum in defendant's restitution order where intervening events made defendant's connection to another investor's losses in the scheme at issue simply "too attenuated" to impose liability on defendant for the investor's victims' losses. Accordingly, the court vacated the sentence with regard to this amount of restitution and remanded for the limited purpose of entering an amended restitution order. The court concluded, however, that the district court did not clearly err in finding that defendant failed to establish that he played a minor role in the offense and therefore was not eligible for a two-level reduction in the base offense level. Accordingly, the court affirmed as to this issue. View "United States v. Swor" on Justia Law

In two separate cases, the government charged defendant with being an alien in the United States after deportation, as well as misrepresenting his identity and citizenship to fraudulently obtain supplemental social security benefits, acquire food stamps, and make a claim of citizenship, and apply for a passport. Defendant was convicted of all charges and his primary defense to all the charges was that he was a citizen of the United States. The court concluded that the district court erred in invoking an inherent "gate-keeping" authority to exclude defendant's birth certificate pursuant to Federal Rule of Evidence 104(a) without relying on some substantive basis outside of Rule 104(a); the district court erred by concluding that no reasonable juror could determine that the birth certificate was "substantively genuine," and by excluding the birth certificate pursuant to Rule 403 without first assessing its probative value when taken as a true record of defendant's birth; and the district court's exclusion of the central piece of evidence for defendant's main defense to a critical element of all the charges in the two cases was violation of defendant's Fifth Amendment right to present a defense. Because the district court's error was not harmless, the court vacated all of the convictions and remanded for a retrial. View "United States v. Evans, Sr." on Justia Law

Defendant removed plaintiff's putative class action to federal court, contending that there was federal jurisdiction over the action under the Class Action Fairness Act of 2005 (CAFA), Pub. L. No. 109-2, 119 Stat. 4, and 28 U.S.C. 1332(d)(2). Plaintiff alleged that the amount in controversy did not exceed $5 million and waived any claim by the class in excess of the amount. The district court granted plaintiff's motion to remand based on plaintiff's waiver. The court held that a lead plaintiff of a putative class could not reduce the amount in controversy on behalf of absent class members, so there was no justification for assigning to the allegation weight so significant that it affected a defendant's right to a federal forum under section 1332(d)(2). The court also held that the legal certainty standard in Lowdermilk v. U.S. Bank National Association had been effectively overruled and that the proper burden of proof imposed upon a defendant to establish the amount in controversy was the preponderance of the evidence standard pursuant to Standard Fire Ins. Co. v. Knowles. Accordingly, the court vacated and remanded to the district court to apply the preponderance standard to the amount-in-controversy evidence. View " Rodriguez v. AT&T Mobility Services LLC" on Justia Law

Defendant was convicted of sixteen counts of making a false claim for farm benefits in violation of 18 U.S.C. 1014 and subsequently appealed the district court's loss calculation. The court concluded that the record revealed sufficient evidence that defendant was not entitled to any portion of the indemnity payments as an "intended beneficiary" under U.S.S.G. 2B1.1 cmt. n.3(F)(ii), and the district court did not err in including in the loss calculation the full indemnity amount for all claims from the properties at issue; the district court did not err by including the total amount of the indemnities in the loss calculation; and the district court did not err by including in the loss calculation two other categories of expenses: A&O expenses - fees that the government pays to the insurance company for selling and servicing the policy - and premium subsidies. Accordingly, the court affirmed the judgment of the district court. View "United States v. Torlai, Jr." on Justia Law

Defendant repeatedly violated his terms of supervised release after a child pornography conviction and the district court revoked his supervised release. Opper v. United States held that, in criminal proseuctions, where guilt must be established beyond a reasonable doubt, the Supreme Court required a conviction to rest on more than the uncorroborated confession of the defendant. The court concluded that the Opper rule did not apply to supervised release revocation proceedings and the district court did not abuse its discretion in revoking defendant's supervised release based on defendant's confession that he had violated restrictions on contact with minors. Accordingly, the court affirmed the judgment of the district court. View "United States v. Hilger" on Justia Law