United States v. Ralph Maldonado

MEMORANDUM

Defendant-Appellant Ralph Anthony Maldonado was convicted following a jury trial of transferring obscene materials to minors in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 1470 . Maldonado appeals his conviction, contending that a jury instruction to which he did not specifically object constituted plain error. We affirm.

The district court instructed the jury that the “local community” it should consider in deciding whether the material violated a community standard for obscenity was “the region from which you have been drawn, encompassing the counties in which you reside in the Eastern District of California.” Maldonado contends that, because the material was transmitted over the Internet, the jury should have been instructed to judge whether the material was obscene relative to the standards of the national community or the receiving local community, but not the sending local community.

With respect to the national community standard, in United States v. Kilbride, 584 F.3d 1240, 1255 (9th Cir.2009), we held that the law on this precise question was “highly unsettled” prior to the decision in that very case. Kilbride was issued on October 28, 2009. In our case, the jury returned its…