In an en banc decision, the Ninth Circuit has determined that a conviction for joyriding in California is not a crime involving moral turpitude, finding the statute to be overbroad and indivisible. The court also provided a detailed explanation of how to employ the categorical and modified categorical approaches. Notably, the court suggested that the charging document may assist a court in determining whether disjunctively worded phrases in a statute are alternative elements or alternative means.
"Prosecutors may not charge a defendant in the disjunctive, as the indictment did here, if they are charging two separate offenses. As noted in Descamps, '[a] prosecutor charging a violation of a divisible statute must generally select the relevant element from its list of alternatives.' Thus, when reviewing the Shepard documents, a court can discover what the prosecutor included as elements of the crime and to what elements the petitioner pleaded guilty. Therefore, because the indictment charged Almanza with having intent either to permanently deprive or temporarily deprive the owner, the indictment reveals that (under state law) the two forms of intent are alternative means of accomplishing the same crime instead of two separate crimes. Section 10851 is therefore an indivisible statute."
The en banc court did not address perhaps the biggest issue in the underlying 3 judge panel decision - whether an inconclusive record of conviction (i.e. a divisible statute, where the record of conviction does not clearly establish which alternative elements underpinned a defendant's conviction) can meet a non-citizen's burden of proving eligibility for relief from removal.
The full text of Almanza-Arenas v. Lynch can be found here: http://cdn.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/opinions/2015/12/28/09-71415.pdf
