United States v. Nathan Manuelito

NOT FOR PUBLICATION
UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS FILED
FOR THE NINTH CIRCUIT MAR 15 2012
MOLLY C. DWYER, CLERK
U .S. C O U R T OF APPE ALS
UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, No. 10-10133
Plaintiff - Appellee, D.C. No. 3:09-cr-08073-PGR-1
v.
MEMORANDUM *
NATHAN BROOKS MANUELITO,
Defendant - Appellant.
Appeal from the United States District Court
for the District of Arizona
Paul G. Rosenblatt, Senior District Judge, Presiding
Submitted March 13, 2012 **
San Francisco, California
Before: McKEOWN and M. SMITH, Circuit Judges, and ROTHSTEIN, Senior
District Judge.***
*
This disposition is not appropriate for publication and is not precedent
except as provided by Ninth Circuit Rule 36-3.
**
The panel unanimously concludes this case is suitable for decision
without oral argument. See Fed. R. App. P. 34(a)(2).
***
The Honorable Barbara Jacobs Rothstein, Senior District Judge for the
U.S. District Court for Western Washington, sitting by designation.
Defendant-Appellant Nathan Brooks Manuelito appeals his conviction for
intentional and reckless assault, resulting in serious bodily injury. As the facts and
procedural history are familiar to the parties, we do not recite them here except as
necessary to explain our disposition. We have jurisdiction under 28 U.S.C. § 1291.
We affirm.
Manuelito argues that the self-defense jury instruction was erroneous
because it did not explicitly state that the government has the burden of disproving
each of the three elements of self-defense beyond a reasonable doubt. The
government first contends that Manuelito waived this argument under the “invited
error” doctrine because he requested the model jury instruction that the court
provided to the jury. See United States v. Guthrie, 931 F.2d 564, 567 (9th Cir.
1991) (“When the defendant himself proposes the jury instruction he later attacks
on appeal, review is denied under the ‘invited error’ doctrine.”). We disagree. The
invited error doctrine only applies if the defendant was aware that he was
relinquishing a known right. See United States v. Romm, 455 F.3d 990, 1004 n.17
(9th Cir. 2006). There is no evidence in the record that Manuelito’s trial counsel
believed that the model jury instructions were flawed.
As to the merits of Manuelito’s argument, we agree with the government
that the trial court properly instructed the jury. The trial court used this circuit’s
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Model Criminal Jury Instruction 6.7, which states that the government “must prove
beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant did not act in reasonable self-
defense.” In United States v. Ramirez, 537 F.3d 1075, 1083 (9th Cir. 2008), we
stated that this model jury instruction “properly informed the jury that the
government bore the burden of disproving [the defendant’s] defense.” Manuelito
relies on United States v. Pierre, 254 F.3d 872 (9th Cir. 2001) and United States v.
Sanchez -Lima, 161 F.3d 545 (9th Cir. 1998), in which we reversed convictions
because of improper self-defense jury instructions. However, those cases are
inapposite because they involved an older version of the self-defense model jury
instruction that did not specifically instruct the jury that the government had the
burden of disproving self-defense. Indeed, in Pierre, we stated that the revised
jury instruction, used in Manuelito’s case, “has been amended to reflect the holding
in Sanchez-Lima.” 254 F.3d at 876, n.1. Accordingly, the jury instruction was
appropriate, and we affirm Manuelito’s conviction.
AFFIRMED.
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