Court Opinion

ID: 9498499
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 17:19:07.261148+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:58:51.993833
License: Public Domain

O’SCANNLAIN, Circuit Judge,
dissenting.
I respectfully submit that the court has substituted its independent analysis of the record for that of the Immigration Judge (the “IJ”), and, in so doing, has exceeded its authority and intruded upon the proper role of the fact finder. Because I conclude that the IJ’s findings deserve greater deference than the majority accords them, I respectfully dissent from the decision to grant Lin Quan’s petition.
I
Where the BIA has summarily affirmed the decision of an IJ, we review the IJ’s decision as though it were the opinion of the BIA, see Falcon Carriche v. Ashcroft, 350 F.3d 845, 849 (9th Cir.2003), and we must accept the IJ’s finding of fact unless the evidence compels a contrary conclusion. See INS v. Elias-Zacarias, 502 U.S. 478, 481 n. 1, 112 S.Ct. 812, 117 L.Ed.2d 38 (1992). This is an extremely deferential standard of review: it is not enough that the evidence supports a contrary conclusion, that the panel would have weighed the evidence differently, id., or even that the panel is persuaded that the finding is incorrect; the evidence must be so over*891whelming that not just the panel in question but “any reasonable adjudicator would be compelled to conclude the contrary.” 8 U.S.C. § 1252(b)(4)(B) (emphases added). The law and the Supreme Court are unequivocal on this point. See id.; Elias-Zacarias, 502 U.S. at 481 n. 1, 112 S.Ct. 812 (“To reverse the BIA finding we must find that the evidence not only supports that conclusion, but compels it.”).
A
The majority discusses some of the implausibilities and inconsistencies on which the IJ based his adverse credibility finding and purports to show how the implausibilities are conjectural and how the inconsistencies can be explained. On some points the majority is persuasive, but, given the extremely deferential standard of review that we must apply, enough evidence remains, in my view, to support the IJ’s finding.
In particular, Quaris account of how her mother was able to obtain 3,000 RMB to procure her release from detention is accepted at face value by the majority despite contrary evidence in the record. Quan testified that her mother was able to withdraw the money from her savings bank on a Sunday, but Quaris husband repeatedly testified that such banks are closed on Sundays. It is not accurate, therefore, to say that “[i]n order for the IJ to come to [his] conclusion, he had to assume facts not in evidence,” maj. op. at 888.1 The IJ explicitly found that the contradictory testimony of the husband— who had every reason to corroborate his wife’s story and no reason to undermine it — cast substantial doubt on Quan’s credibility. This sort of weighing of evidence is emphatically the prerogative of an IJ and the fact that the apparent inconsistency affects a key aspect of Quaris allegation of persecution should make it an unassailable basis for an adverse credibility finding.
Quan’s testimony was also confused and incomplete with respect to the number and dates of the prayer meetings that she attended, and the timing of her confession, of her belief in Jesus Christ to her husband. The majority attempts to down-play the significance of the latter point by labeling it as a minor discrepancy in dates. As the majority characterizes it, the one month difference between the date when Quan claims to have told her husband about her Christian practice and the date that her husband claims to have learned of it is of no import, but the IJ had good reason to view it otherwise. What concerned the IJ was the fact that, although Quan attributed her mother’s recovery from illness to her new practice of Christianity, she appears to have withheld this information from her husband — who was sympathetic to Christianity — throughout the course of his own father’s illness. The time between *892July and August, 1996, therefore, was not insignificant. That month marks an important change in circumstances: it is the difference between Quan informing her husband of her newfound faith in the healing power of Christian prayer while her husband’s father was still alive and telling him at his father’s funeral. In the case of a meaningful inconsistency such as this, it is the IJ’s duty to consider the first-person testimony before him and to resolve the evidentiary confusion either for or against the petitioner. This the IJ did, and, because his conclusion is reasonably supported by evidence in the record — namely, the testimony of Quan’s husband — we are not entitled to disturb it.
The majority’s justifications of its own interpretations of this and other inconsistencies are reasonable, but so too is the IJ’s scepticism, which should not be supplanted unless it is wholly conjectural or has no basis in the record. Because there is genuine confusion and inconsistency in the record on these points, and because the IJ’s conclusions are supported by evidence in the record, it simply cannot be said that the evidence compels reversal. I would, therefore, affirm the IJ’s adverse credibility finding and deny the petition.
II
The IJ also found that a single detention, for less than one day, during which Quan had her hair pulled, was shaken, and was poked once with an electric prod in her shoulder/neck area did not rise to the level of persecution.
Given the inconsistent thresholds for finding persecution applied by different panels of this court, it is not surprising that the majority is able to cite a case in which we held that similar facts amounted to persecution. See Guo v. Ashcroft, 361 F.3d 1194 (9th Cir.). In that case, however, the petitioner was detained for a day and half (more than 50% longer than in this case), was struck twice in the face, kicked in the stomach, and ordered to do push-ups until he collapsed. By contrast, in other cases we have held that a single detention, during which the petitioner was beaten, did not compel a finding of persecution because the petitioner did not require medical attention. See, e.g., Prasad v. INS, 47 F.3d 336, 339 (9th Cir.1995).
The majority argues that the lingering physical and mental symptoms about which Quan testified and the fact that she lost her job because the police visited her workplace support a finding of persecution. That may be so, but the fact that Quan did not testify that she required medical treatment, which was an important factor in our holding in Prasad, that she claims to have heard, second-hand, that she had lost her job but never bothered to confirm the report, and that, although her husband worked at the same company, nobody ever told him that she had been fired. On the basis of this evidence it was reasonable for the IJ to find that Quan had not been persecuted.
Because I do not believe that an IJ’s decision should be overturned merely because the reviewing panel disagrees with it or can point to a plausibly analogous case from our abundant and inconsistent precedent, and because the evidence in this case does not compel a finding of persecution, I would affirm the IJ’s decision and deny the petition.
Ill
Finally, Quan and her counsel, Mr. Douglas Ingraham, are fortunate that this petition was not dismissed for failure to abide by Fed. R.App. P. 28(a)(9)(A), which requires a brief to contain “citations to the ... part of the record on which the appellant relies.” See also Ninth Circuit Rule *893No. 28-2.8. Given the limited resources of both the government and this court, it was irresponsible of Quan’s counsel to shift the burden of sifting through almost 900 pages of administrative record onto the government and this court to find the facts on which Quan bases her argument. In De la Rosa v. Scottsdale Memorial Health Systems, Inc., 136 F.3d 1241, 1243 (9th Cir.1998), we “declare[d] that this habit of noncompliance must end” and we have, on at least two occasions, struck briefs and dismissed appeals for failure to comply with this basic requirement. See Mitchel v. General Electric Company, 689 F.2d 877, 878 (9th Cir.1982); N/S Corporation v. Liberty Mutual Insurance Company, 127 F.3d 1145, 1146 (9th Cir.1997).
The majority concedes the technical deficiencies of the brief and admits that it is “sympathetic to the Respondent’s argument [that the brief be struck and the case dismissed],” maj. op. at 886, but concludes that dismissal is not necessary “[b]ecause we have conducted our own independent review of the administrative record.” Id. at 886. With all due respect to the majority’s commendable diligence, that is beside the point. Opposing counsel, or, as in this case, the court, will often be able to compensate for a party’s shortcomings, but doing so involves a waste of limited time and resources. The rules governing the form and content of appellate briefs are not merely hortatory; they must be obeyed, and, when they are not, the consequences should be real. Mr. Ingraham should consider himself exceedingly fortunate that the only consequence of his inadequate performance in this case is a verbal admonishment. He should not expect to escape so lightly in the future.

. Ironically, it is the majority's analysis which relies on facts not in evidence. The majority's reliance on a website of unknown reliability to establish that "banks in China are typically open on Sundays,” maj. op. at 888 (emphasis added), is a novel — and, I would respectfully suggest, misguided — application of the doctrine of judicial notice. See Fed.R.Evid. 201(b) ("A judicially noticed fact must be one not subject to reasonable dispute in that it is either (1) generally known within the territorial jurisdiction of the trial court or (2) capable of accurate and ready determination by resort to sources whose accuracy cannot reasonably be questioned.”).
More importantly, this “evidence” fails to undermine the IJ's adverse credibility determination. Even assuming these dubious sources establish the veracity of the petitioner's statement, the IJ relied on inconsistencies between the petitioner's testimony and her husband's in making a credibility determination' — a fact independent of the bank’s actual operating hours. The IJ needed to consider only the petitioner’s testimony — not facts outside the record — to support this conclusion.