NOT FOR PUBLICATION

UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS

FOR THE NINTH CIRCUIT

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, 

Plaintiff-Appellee, 

 v. 

MANUEL VALDOVINOS REYES, AKA 

Carlos Cepeda, AKA Manuel Reyes, AKA 

Manuel Valdovinos, AKA Manuel Reyes 

Valdovinos, 

Defendant-Appellant.

No. 19-50295 

D.C. No. 

5:18-cr-00328-MWF-1 

MEMORANDUM*

Appeal from the United States District Court

for the Central District of California

Michael W. Fitzgerald, District Judge, Presiding

Argued and Submitted October 20, 2021

Pasadena, California

Before: CALLAHAN and FORREST, Circuit Judges, and AMON,** District Judge.

Manuel Valdovinos Reyes appeals his conviction and sentence for illegal 

reentry in violation of 8 U.S.C. § 1326. We have jurisdiction under 28 U.S.C. § 1291, 

* This disposition is not appropriate for publication and is not precedent 

except as provided by Ninth Circuit Rule 36-3.

** The Honorable Carol Bagley Amon, United States District Judge for 

the Eastern District of New York, sitting by designation.

FILED

MAY 9 2022

MOLLY C. DWYER, CLERK

U.S. COURT OF APPEALS
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and we affirm in part, vacate in part, and remand for the limited purpose of 

permitting the district court to reconsider the conditions of supervised release.

1. Aggravated Felony. Reyes argues that his illegal reentry conviction is 

invalid because his prior Illinois conviction for attempted murder was not an

aggravated felony. To determine whether a state conviction for attempted murder 

qualifies as an “aggravated felony” under 8 U.S.C. § 1227, we compare the 

underlying statute of conviction with its federal equivalent to determine whether 

they are a categorical match. See Moncrieffe v. Holder, 569 U.S. 184, 190 (2013); 8 

U.S.C. §§ 1101(a)(43)(A), (U) (designating attempted murder as an aggravated 

felony).

In this case, Reyes’s state conviction for attempted murder is a categorical 

match to its federal equivalent. Both require that a “substantial step” be taken with 

specific intent to commit murder. 720 Ill. Comp. Stat. 5/8-4(a); 720 Ill. Comp. Stat. 

5/9-1; United States v. Gracidas-Ulibarry, 231 F.3d 1188, 1192 (9th Cir. 2000) (en 

banc). While first-degree murder in Illinois also encompasses felony murder, 720 

Ill. Comp. Stat. 5/2-8, where the federal definition does not, it is a legal impossibility 

that Reyes’s conviction was premised on felony murder because Illinois felony 

murder is incompatible with a conviction for an attempt crime. People v. Viser, 343 

N.E.2d 903, 910 (Ill. 1975); see United States v. Gomez-Hernandez, 680 F.3d 1171, 

1172–77 (9th Cir. 2012) (“[I]gnor[ing] his crime of conviction” is a “hyper-
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formalistic approach” that inappropriately overlooks the “context of the defendant’s 

actual crime of conviction.”).

1 Therefore, we conclude that Reyes’s prior state 

conviction was a proper predicate offense for removal, and we affirm his conviction

for illegal reentry.

2. Terms of Supervised Release. As part of Reyes’s sentence, the district 

court imposed a term of supervised release, including Standard Condition 14 that

requires Reyes to “notify specific persons and organizations of specific risks” he 

poses to those persons or organizations at his probation officer’s direction. We have 

held that this standard condition is unconstitutionally vague because it fails to 

“answer the question of what conduct the defendant needed to warn the public 

about.” United States v. Magdirila, 962 F.3d 1152, 1158 (9th Cir. 2020). 

Consequently, we vacate this condition of release and remand for the district court 

to “craft a supervised release condition that accords with [Reyes’s] criminal history.” 

Id. at 1159. 

AFFIRMED IN PART, VACATED IN PART, AND REMANDED. 

1Because we conclude that Reyes’s state attempted murder conviction is an 

aggravated felony, we need not analyze the government’s argument that it also

constitutes an aggravated felony as a “crime of violence” under 8 U.S.C. 

§ 1101(a)(43)(F).