Defendant Steven Duarte’s conviction was vacated when the court determined that the federal ban on felons guilty of non-violent criminal acts was unconstitutional.
Duarte was involved in a police chase during which he tossed a gun out of his vehicle window. The suspect had a lengthy criminal history, though none were for violent offenses. He was reportedly a known member of a Los Angeles street gang with five previous felony convictions.
The Ninth Circuit considered this in deciding that Duarte’s gun rights would not have been stripped away during the nation’s Founding Era.
Judge Carlos Bea wrote for the majority in the 2-1 decision. “Duarte is an American citizen, and thus one of ‘the people’ whom the Second Amendment protects. The Second Amendment’s 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’s history.”
Judge Bea further noted that Duarte’s vandalism conviction would almost certainly have been a misdemeanor during the founding of the country. As for being a felon in possession of a firearm, this crime did not exist until the 20th century.
Other convictions that included drug possession and evading a police officer could not be traced back to the Founding Era.
Considering this, the panel determined that “we cannot say that Duarte’s predicate offenses were, by Founding Era standards, of a nature serious enough to justify permanently depriving him of his fundamental Second Amendment rights.”
There is a growing rift in the federal judiciary over whether gun rights are automatically and permanently nullified for anyone convicted of a crime punishable by more than two years in prison.
This may lead to the U.S. Supreme Court addressing the issue. Is it constitutional for a person convicted of a non-violent criminal offense to automatically forfeit Second Amendment rights forever?
The Ninth Circuit viewed the federal statute through the prism of the high court’s 2022 Bruen decision. This established the guideline of the nation’s history and tradition setting the groundwork for future laws regarding firearms.
If the gun control law or proposal is not rooted in established statutes and practices, it violates the Second Amendment.
There was not an immediate reaction from the Department of Justice. However, the DOJ previously asked the Supreme Court to review Garland v. Range, another case involving the gun rights of a convicted felon.
As with US v. Duarte, it was determined that the defendant’s gun rights did not disappear automatically upon conviction.
Dissenting was Judge Milan Smith. He asserted the high court established the legality of barring felons from gun ownership in earlier cases. But this argument did not carry enough weight to sway the other two judges on the panel.
Bea countered that the Heller decision determined that “the people” included “all Americans” rather than a smaller subset. “More importantly, Bruen ratified that broad definition, quoting Heller’s language directly to hold that ‘the Second Amendment guarantee[s] to all Americans’ the right to bear commonly used arms in public.”
The panel then rejected the government’s assertion that the Founding Era law prohibited gun ownership for some minority groups.
Besides the obviously discriminatory nature of the statutes, the Ninth Circuit determined that the laws did not align close enough to the modern prohibition on convicted felons.
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