United States v. Manuel Reyes ( 2022 )

NOT FOR PUBLICATION FILED
UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS MAY 9 2022
MOLLY C. DWYER, CLERK
U.S. COURT OF APPEALS
FOR THE NINTH CIRCUIT
UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, No. 19-50295
Plaintiff-Appellee, D.C. No.
5:18-cr-00328-MWF-1
v.
MANUEL VALDOVINOS REYES, AKA MEMORANDUM*
Carlos Cepeda, AKA Manuel Reyes, AKA
Manuel Valdovinos, AKA Manuel Reyes
Valdovinos,
Defendant-Appellant.
Appeal from the United States District Court
for the Central District of California
Michael W. Fitzgerald, District Judge, Presiding
Argued and Submitted October 20, 2021
Pasadena, California
Before: CALLAHAN and FORREST, Circuit Judges, and AMON,** District Judge.
Manuel Valdovinos Reyes appeals his conviction and sentence for illegal
reentry in violation of 8 U.S.C. § 1326. We have jurisdiction under 28 U.S.C. § 1291,
*
This disposition is not appropriate for publication and is not precedent
except as provided by Ninth Circuit Rule 36-3.
**
The Honorable Carol Bagley Amon, United States District Judge for
the Eastern District of New York, sitting by designation.
and we affirm in part, vacate in part, and remand for the limited purpose of
permitting the district court to reconsider the conditions of supervised release.
1. Aggravated Felony. Reyes argues that his illegal reentry conviction is
invalid because his prior Illinois conviction for attempted murder was not an
aggravated felony. To determine whether a state conviction for attempted murder
qualifies as an “aggravated felony” under 8 U.S.C. § 1227, we compare the
underlying statute of conviction with its federal equivalent to determine whether
they are a categorical match. See Moncrieffe v. Holder, 569 U.S. 184, 190 (2013); 8
U.S.C. §§ 1101(a)(43)(A), (U) (designating attempted murder as an aggravated
felony).
In this case, Reyes’s state conviction for attempted murder is a categorical
match to its federal equivalent. Both require that a “substantial step” be taken with
specific intent to commit murder. 720 Ill. Comp. Stat. 5/8-4(a); 720 Ill. Comp. Stat.
5/9-1; United States v. Gracidas-Ulibarry, 231 F.3d 1188, 1192 (9th Cir. 2000) (en
banc). While first-degree murder in Illinois also encompasses felony murder, 720
Ill. Comp. Stat. 5/2-8, where the federal definition does not, it is a legal impossibility
that Reyes’s conviction was premised on felony murder because Illinois felony
murder is incompatible with a conviction for an attempt crime. People v. Viser, 343
N.E.2d 903, 910 (Ill. 1975); see United States v. Gomez-Hernandez, 680 F.3d 1171,
1172–77 (9th Cir. 2012) (“[I]gnor[ing] his crime of conviction” is a “hyper-
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formalistic approach” that inappropriately overlooks the “context of the defendant’s
actual crime of conviction.”).1 Therefore, we conclude that Reyes’s prior state
conviction was a proper predicate offense for removal, and we affirm his conviction
for illegal reentry.
2. Terms of Supervised Release. As part of Reyes’s sentence, the district
court imposed a term of supervised release, including Standard Condition 14 that
requires Reyes to “notify specific persons and organizations of specific risks” he
poses to those persons or organizations at his probation officer’s direction. We have
held that this standard condition is unconstitutionally vague because it fails to
“answer the question of what conduct the defendant needed to warn the public
about.” United States v. Magdirila, 962 F.3d 1152, 1158 (9th Cir. 2020).
Consequently, we vacate this condition of release and remand for the district court
to “craft a supervised release condition that accords with [Reyes’s] criminal history.”
Id. at 1159.
AFFIRMED IN PART, VACATED IN PART, AND REMANDED.
1
Because we conclude that Reyes’s state attempted murder conviction is an
aggravated felony, we need not analyze the government’s argument that it also
constitutes an aggravated felony as a “crime of violence” under 8 U.S.C.
§ 1101(a)(43)(F).
3