Filed 2/26/21 P. v. Mora CA2/8 NOT TO BE PUBLISHED IN THE OFFICIAL REPORTS California Rules of Court, rule 8.1115(a), prohibits courts and parties from citing or relying on opinions not certified for publication or ordered published, except as specified by rule 8.1115(b). This opinion has not been certified for publication or ordered published for purposes of rule 8.1115. IN THE COURT OF APPEAL OF THE STATE OF CALIFORNIA SECOND APPELLATE DISTRICT DIVISION EIGHT THE PEOPLE, B304887 Plaintiff and Respondent, (Los Angeles County Super. Ct. No. A886806) v. RAMON GOMEZ MORA, Defendant and Appellant. APPEAL from an order of the Superior Court of Los Angeles County, Juan Carlos Dominguez, Judge. Affirmed. Douglas Jalaie for Defendant and Appellant. Xavier Becerra, Attorney General, Lance E. Winters, Chief Assistant Attorney General, Susan Sullivan Pithey, Senior Assistant Attorney General, Steven D. Matthews, Supervising Deputy Attorney General, and Rama R. Maline, Deputy Attorney General, for Plaintiff and Respondent. ____________________ Ramon Gomez Mora pleaded guilty to a drug offense in 1992. Almost 30 years later, he moved to vacate his conviction, arguing he would not have pleaded guilty had he known the immigration consequences of his plea. The trial court denied Mora’s motion. We affirm. Undesignated statutory citations are to the Penal Code. I Mora has given us a slim record. We have no documentation from the underlying criminal proceedings other than some largely illegible minute orders and abstracts of judgment. We separately obtained Mora’s largely illegible guilty plea from the Los Angeles Superior Court; inexplicably, this document was missing from the Clerk’s Transcript. We recount facts we can decipher from the meager record Mora has supplied. On November 23, 1992, Mora pleaded guilty to a single count for violation of Health and Safety Code section 11350, subdivision (a). The abstract of judgment says “poss cocaine” next to this count. We have no transcript or other description of the plea hearing. The court sentenced Mora to 90 days in jail plus three years of probation. Mora had 49 days of custody credits at the time. About a year later, in 1993, Mora apparently violated probation and was ordered to serve a low term of 16 months in prison. On October 28, 2019, nearing three decades after his conviction, Mora filed a motion to vacate the conviction under section 1473.7. This appeal concerns that motion. Mora’s motion argued his trial counsel never addressed immigration consequences with him and Mora did not 2 meaningfully understand the immigration consequences of his plea. The motion maintained he would have rejected the plea bargain had he known the consequences. Mora argued his trial counsel rendered ineffective assistance by failing to counsel him about possible immigration consequences and by failing to pursue dispositions offering more promising immigration outcomes. Mora included his declaration with the motion. This declaration is brief: one and one quarter pages. Mora declares he was born in Mexico in 1949, entered the United States in 1971 with a valid visa, and has lived here ever since. He married in ...
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Source: All recent Immigration Decisions In All the U.S. Courts of Appeals