NOT FOR PUBLICATION FILED UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS JUL 1 2019 MOLLY C. DWYER, CLERK U.S. COURT OF APPEALS FOR THE NINTH CIRCUIT UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, No. 18-10022 Plaintiff-Appellee, D.C. No. 4:16-cr-01057-JGZ-LCK-1 v. MARIA MARGARITA VALDEZ- MEMORANDUM* ARAIZA, AKA Maria Margarita Valdez, Defendant-Appellant. Appeal from the United States District Court for the District of Arizona Jennifer G. Zipps, District Judge, Presiding Argued and Submitted June 14, 2019 San Francisco, California Before: SCHROEDER and M. SMITH, Circuit Judges, and RAKOFF,** District Judge. Maria Margarita Valdez-Araiza appeals her conviction for knowingly making a false statement in a passport application, in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 1542. We have jurisdiction pursuant to 28 U.S.C. § 1291, and we affirm. * This disposition is not appropriate for publication and is not precedent except as provided by Ninth Circuit Rule 36-3. ** The Honorable Jed S. Rakoff, United States District Judge for the Southern District of New York, sitting by designation. Valdez applied for a U.S. passport under the name “Maria Margarita Valdez,” with a date of birth in 1956 and a place of birth in Nogales, Arizona. In signing the application, Valdez “declare[d] under penalty of perjury” that she was “a citizen or non-citizen national of the United States.” At the time she applied for the passport, Valdez possessed a Mexican birth record, which stated that she was born in 1957 in Mexico. This document was not included with her passport application. After obtaining a U.S. passport, Valdez applied for a delayed birth certificate from the State of Arizona, which denied the application after becoming aware of Valdez’s Mexican birth record. The government subsequently revoked Valdez’s passport, due to its discovery of the birth record. After a grand jury indicted Valdez for violating § 1542, a first trial ended in a hung jury and mistrial, and Valdez retained new counsel before retrial. Following a four-day trial, the jury entered a guilty verdict. 1. As an initial matter, the parties dispute the proper standard of review for Valdez’s expert testimony challenges. Federal Rule of Evidence 103 requires that “if the opposing party violates the terms of [an] initial ruling, objection must be made when the evidence is offered to preserve the claim of error for appeal.” Fed. R. Evid. 103 advisory committee’s note to 2000 amendment. Because Valdez failed to object during her second trial when the government introduced evidence in violation of the district court’s in limine ruling from the first trial, her objections 2 were not preserved, and so we will review them for plain error. 2. The district court erroneously admitted certain evidence in Valdez’s second trial. Anthony Jackson, an adjudications officer with U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, testified that if he were presented with a hypothetical individual with circumstances identical to Valdez’s, “[i]t would tell me that they weren’t a U.S. citizen and that they were an alien.” Given that the jury was tasked with determining whether Valdez was a U.S. citizen, Jackson was not permitted to opine on ...
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