A Mississippi case leads US appeals court to strike down lifetime gun ban for drug users
The U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans tossed the conviction of a Mississippi man after striking down a decades-old law prohibiting illegal drug users from owning firearms during their lifetime.
The three-judge panel issued the ruling Wednesday in a federal case of Patrick Daniels, a Hancock County man arrested and later sentenced to prison for being an unlawful drug user in possession of firearms. The case was prosecuted in federal court in Gulfport.
Federal public defenders, Leilani Tynes and John Weber, represented Daniels at trial, and fellow attorney Kym Gore, did the oral arguments during the appeal process.
“In short, our history and tradition may support some limits on an intoxicated person’s right to carry a weapon, but it does not justify disarming a sober citizen based exclusively on his past drug usage,” Fifth Circuit Judge Jerry E. Smith wrote in the unanimous opinion in the U.S. vs. Daniels. “Nor do more generalized traditions of disarming dangerous persons support this restriction on nonviolent drug users.”
The charge and subsequent conviction, the ruling said, violated Daniels’s second amendment right to bear arms, opening the doors to other challengers in cases involving drug users charged under the same federal law.
To further support its decision, the Fifth Circuit noted in its ruling that there was no evidence in the case against Daniels that he was under the influence of drugs or other intoxicants at the time of his arrest.
Arrest in Hancock County
Two drug agents arrested Daniels on a federal charge after a traffic stop in Hancock County in April 2022 for driving without a license plate.
The officers smelled marijuana and subsequently searched Daniels’ Ford F-150, resulting in the seizure of ‘multiple partially burned marijuana blunts” in an ashtray and two firearms.
Drug Task Force Agent Ray Bell said in a criminal complaint that agents found a loaded AR-15-style rifle and 9 mm pistol in the vehicle and that Daniels admitted to smoking marijuana about 14 days a month.
The officer never drug-tested Daniels, though he did admit that he would test positive for marijuana.
After his arrest, Daniels’ attorneys tried to get his charges dismissed, arguing the law was unconstitutional under the Second Amendment, but a federal judge denied the request.
Meanwhile, Daniels is in prison, still seving the remainder of a 46-month sentence for the crime. His attorneys could not comment on the case.
The ruling in the Firth Circuit
The Fifth Circuit ruled that Daniels still had a right to bear arms.
“Even as a marijuana user, Daniels is a member of our political community,” Judge Smith wrote. “Therefore, he has a presumptive right to bear arms. By infringing on that right, § 922(g)(3) contradicts the plain text of the Second Amendment.”
“Throughout American history, laws have regulated the combination of guns and intoxicating substances. But at no point in the 18th or 19th century did the government disarm individuals who used drugs or alcohol at one time from possessing guns at another. A few states banned carrying a weapon while actively under the influence, but those statutes did not emerge until well after the Civil War.”
Judge Stephen Higginson wrote in support of the decision but also expressed some concerns.
“Although our decision is limited in scope, it is hard for me to avoid the conclusion that most, if not all, applications of § 922(g)(3) will likewise be deficient,” Higginson wrote. “It is also important to acknowledge that other gun safety laws, especially longstanding status-based prohibitions previously understood to be constitutionally unassailable, have been recently struck down by courts across the country ...”
When again reviewing the Second Amendment, Higginson urged the Supreme Court to consider that having armed citizenry “is necessary to the security of a free State.”
Gun safety concerns
In the opinion, Higginson also expressed some concerns regarding gun safety nationwide.
In the case of New York State Rifle & Pistol Association Inc. v. Bruen., the U.S. Supreme Court struck down New York’s longstanding law requiring a conceal-carry permit to possess a firearm in public places. The high court ruled the law violated the Fourteenth Amendment because it prevented law-abiding citizens from exercising their second-amendment right to bear arms.
“I cannot help but fear that, absent some reconciliation of the Second Amendment’s several values, any further reductionism of Bruen will mean systematic, albeit inconsistent, judicial dismantling of the laws that have served to protect our country for generations,” he said. “Furthermore, such decisions will constrain the ability of our state and federal political branches to address gun violence across the country, which every day cuts short the lives of our citizens. This state of affairs will be nothing less than a Second Amendment caricature, a right turned inside out, against freedom and security in our State.”
Despite Higginson’s concerns, Judge Smith noted that the Fifth Circuit’s decision was limited in scope and did not call into question the federal prohibition of possessing guns by drug users as a whole.
“We do not invalidate the statute in all its applications, but, importantly, only as applied to Daniels,” Smith wrote. “Nor do we suggest that a robust Second Amendment is incompatible with other reasonable gun regulations.
“Such statutes just need to be consonant with the limits the Founding generation understood to be permissible when they ratified the Second Amendment. The government has failed to demonstrate that here.”
The Department of Justice did not respond to a request for comment.
