{"id":101800,"date":"2024-05-10T13:27:02","date_gmt":"2024-05-10T18:27:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/?p=101800"},"modified":"2024-05-10T13:27:02","modified_gmt":"2024-05-10T18:27:02","slug":"101800","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/?p=101800","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"

Ninth Circuit Panel Rules Non-Violent Felons Can Own Guns<\/a><\/p>\n

Another federal appeals court has determined the Second Amendment protects the gun rights of at least some convicted felons.<\/p>\n

On Thursday, a three-judge panel from the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals sided with defendant Steven Duarte and vacated his conviction. They found the federal ban on felons possessing firearms was unconstitutional as applied to Duarte because his underlying convictions didn\u2019t involve violent crimes.<\/p>\n

\u201cDuarte is an American citizen, and thus one of \u2018the people\u2019 whom the Second Amendment protects,\u201d Judge Carlos Bea\u00a0wrote for a 2-1 court in\u00a0US v. Duarte<\/em><\/a>. \u201cThe Second Amendment\u2019s plain text and historically understood meaning therefore presumptively guarantee his individual right to possess a firearm for self-defense. The Government failed to rebut that presumption by demonstrating that permanently depriving Duarte of this fundamental right is otherwise consistent with our Nation\u2019s history.\u201d<\/p>\n

The ruling deepens the federal circuit split over the constitutionality of the law that bars anyone convicted of a crime punishable by more than two years in prison from ever owning or handling firearms again. Felon-in-possession charges are the most common federal gun prosecutions in the nation. Continued disagreement over the constitutionality of the law underlying those charges may motivate the Supreme Court to address the issue itself directly, especially the question of whether people who aren\u2019t violent present enough of a dangerous threat to be worthy of a lifetime gun ban.<\/p>\n

The history and tradition test the Court set in 2022\u2019s\u00a0New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v. Bruen<\/em>\u00a0has opened up new challenges to all kinds of gun laws, and the Court has yet to hand down another Second Amendment ruling, though\u00a0the case its current considering is likely to delve into the dangerousness question<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The Department of Justice, which defended the federal law, did not respond to a request for comment. However, it\u00a0already requested that the Supreme Court review\u00a0Garland v. Range<\/em><\/a>, the other case in which a federal appeals court found the gun ban unconstitutional as applied to non-violent felons.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Duarte was convicted of illegal gun possession after throwing a gun out of a car window during a police chase. That charge was just the latest in a long rap sheet. However, the panel found none of those previous convictions were for violent crimes, and it determined they probably wouldn\u2019t have resulted in a lifetime gun ban during the founding era.<\/p>\n

\u201cDuarte\u2019s underlying vandalism conviction, we have explained, likely would have made him a misdemeanant at the Founding,\u201d Judge Bea wrote. \u201cDuarte\u2019s second predicate offense\u2014felon in possession of a firearm, Cal. Pen. Code \u00a7 29800(a)(1)\u2014was a nonexistent crime in this country until the passage of the Federal Firearms Act of 1938. As for Duarte\u2019s remaining convictions\u2014drug possession and evading a peace officer\u2014we do not know whether either crime traces back to an analogous, Founding-era predecessor because the Government failed to proffer that evidence. Based on this record, we cannot say that Duarte\u2019s predicate offenses were, by Founding era standards, of a nature serious enough to justify permanently depriving him of his fundamental Second Amendment rights.\u201d<\/p>\n

Milan Smith, a George W. Bush appointee like Judge Bea, dissented. He argued the Supreme Court had already established a law-abiding standard for gun ownership through non-binding dicta in its previous Second Amendment cases.<\/p>\n

\u201cBruen<\/em>\u00a0reiterates that the Second Amendment right belongs only to law-abiding citizens,\u201d he wrote. \u201cDuarte\u2019s Second Amendment challenge to 18 U.S.C. \u00a7 922(g)(1), as applied to nonviolent offenders, is therefore foreclosed.\u201d<\/p>\n

But the majority rejected that reasoning.<\/p>\n

\u201cQuite the opposite,\u00a0Heller<\/em>\u00a0defined \u2018the people\u2019 in the broadest of terms: the phrase\u2019 unambiguously refer[red]\u2019 to \u2018all Americans,\u2019 not \u2018an unspecified subset,’\u201d Judge Bea wrote. \u201cMore importantly,\u00a0Bruen<\/em>\u00a0ratified that broad definition, quoting\u00a0Heller<\/em>\u2018s language directly to hold that \u2018[t]he Second Amendment guarantee[s] to \u2018all Americans\u2019 the right to bear commonly used arms in public.’\u201d<\/p>\n

He went on to say that the majority\u2019s own reading of history \u201cconfirms that \u2018the people\u2019 included, at a minimum, all American citizens\u2014without qualification.\u201d After finding the Second Amendment applies to Duarte, the panel then turned to the historical record to see if a Founding Era gun law could justify the modern day one, as required by\u00a0Bruen<\/em>. The government offered examples of either gun sales or possession bans against \u201cLoyalists, Catholics, Indians, and Blacks\u201d to bolster its case the current prohibition fit in the accepted tradition of regulation. But the majority rejected that argument because, even putting aside the bigoted nature of many of them, they don\u2019t closely match the modern ban.<\/p>\n

\u201cLaws that disarmed British Loyalists, Catholics, Indians, and Blacks fail both the \u2018why\u2019 and \u2018how\u2019 of\u00a0Bruen\u2019s<\/i>\u00a0analogical test,\u201d Judge Bea wrote. \u201cFirst, the \u2018why.\u2019 There is a solid basis in history to infer that states could lawfully disarm these groups because they \u2018were written out of \u2018the people\u2019 altogether. But Duarte is an American citizen and counts among \u2018the people\u2019 by both modern and Founding-era standards. And insofar as legislatures passed these laws to prevent armed insurrections by dangerous groups united along political, ideological, or social lines, the Government offers no historical evidence that the Founding generation perceived formerly incarcerated, non-violent criminals as posing a similar threat of collective, armed resistance.\u201d<\/p>\n

The majority also noted those bans were often less expansive than the current federal ban, and earlier generations enacted them with different goals in mind.<\/p>\n

\u201cInsofar as these laws were meant as \u2018merely temporary\u2019 measures, that \u2018disarm[ed] [a] narrow segment of the population\u2019 because they \u2018threaten[ed] . . . the public safety,\u2019 that does not justify permanently disarming all nonviolent felons today,\u201d Judge Bea wrote.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ninth Circuit Panel Rules Non-Violent Felons Can Own Guns Another federal appeals court has determined the Second Amendment protects the gun rights of at least some convicted felons. On Thursday, a three-judge panel from the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals sided with defendant Steven Duarte and vacated his conviction. They found the federal ban on … Continue reading “”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-101800","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-courts","category-rkba"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/101800","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=101800"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/101800\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":101801,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/101800\/revisions\/101801"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=101800"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=101800"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=101800"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}