Hector Cervantes-Torres was brought to the United States by his parents when he was 13 and was a permanent resident of the United States. He was subsequently deported, but he came back, and at some point allegedly received from the government a sticker on his green card that extended it.
The government later arrested him and charged him with possessing a firearm when he was illegally in the United States. At trial, the Mr. Cervante-Torres admitted all the elements of this offense except for the fact that he was illegally in the United States; his entire defense was that he thought he was legal. However, the judge instructed the jury that his subjective belief was irrelevant, and the jury convicted him.
After that conviction was final, the Supreme Court held that, nope, an element of the offense was indeed that the defendant subjectively knew that he was in the country illegally. So Mr. Cervante-Torres files a writ of coram nobis to vacate his conviction.
The majority opinion is written by Judge Nelson and joined by Judge Miller, and holds that Mr. Cerevane-Torres does not get relief because he's obviously guilty notwithstanding his sole defense at trial, so there was no injustice justifying coram nobis relief since there was no reasonable change the result would have been different.
Judge Nelson then writes a separate concurrence, which no one else on the panel joins, arguing that the Supreme Court should overrule its current coram nobis doctrine, and instead adopt the approach of the dissent in the 1954 Supreme Court case (United States v. Morgan) that held otherwise.
Judge Desai dissents, arguing that when an instruction leaves out the element of the offense, that error justifies coram nobis relief under circuit precedent, and that the result at trial here might well have been different if the trial judge hadn't ruled that the defendant's sole defense wasn't actually a defense.
Which approach more closely approximates your own views? Judge Miller's view that the evidence here crystal clearly established the defendant's guilt? Judge Nelson's view that the Supreme Court should go back and adopt the views expressed in a 1954 dissent? Or Judge Desai's view that the result here might have been different and justifies coram nobis relief?
