Category: Firearms

Supreme Court Takes Up Law Enforcement Related Cases

by · Oct 4, 2024 10:19 am

The U.S. Supreme Court issued a short orders list from Monday’s pre-term conference, adding 15 cases to the docket for the October 2024 Term. A much longer list of cases turned down will likely be issued next Monday at the formal opening of the term.

Continuing the high court’s frustrating lack of interest in criminal law, the list includes only one actual criminal case, Thompson v. United States, No. 23-1095. This case raises the question of whether the federal law against false statements to financial institutions and federal agencies extends to misleading half truths. An aspect of the case that increases its media profile is the fact that defendant Patrick Daley Thompson is the grandson of Chicago’s notoriously corrupt mayor Richard J. Daley and the nephew of later mayor Richard M. Daley.

There are also several law-enforcement-related civil cases, a category that gets more interest from SCOTUS:

Gutierrez v. Saenz, No. 23-7809, is a federal civil rights suit regarding a Texas capital case. It presents somewhat complex issues regarding DNA testing, standing, and distinctions between innocence claims and sentencing claims.

Barnes v. Felix, No. 23-1239, is a police use-of-force case involving the “moment of threat doctrine.” As described by the petitioner (i.e., the plaintiff suing the police officer), this approach “evaluates the reasonableness of an officer’s actions only in the narrow window when the officer’s safety was threatened, and not based on events that precede the moment of the threat.” In the Fifth Circuit, Judge Higginbotham wrote a concurrence to his own majority opinion asking the Supreme Court to resolve the circuit split on this issue. Continue reading . . .

Arms, Abusers, and Originalism

by · Jun 21, 2024 11:17 am

Federal law prohibits persons who are subject to domestic violence restraining orders from possessing firearms. (See 18 U.S.C. § 922(g)(8).) Today, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected a facial challenge to this law, 8-1. Only Justice Thomas dissented.

A key issue is how closely a gun-control law must track those in existence at the Founding to be considered consistent with the Second Amendment. Chief Justice Roberts, writing the opinion of the Court, states that the historical analyses of recent cases “were not meant to suggest a law trapped in amber.” Just as the protection of the amendment is not limited to the muskets of 1791, neither are the permissible regulations limited to duplicates of those in force at the time. This touches off an extensive discussion of originalism. Continue reading . . .

Supreme Court Invalidates Bump Stock Regulation

by · Jun 14, 2024 8:38 am

In October 2017, a horrific crime was committed in Las Vegas, Nevada. As stated in today’s Supreme Court opinion in Garland v. Cargill, “a gunman fired on a crowd attending an outdoor music festival in Las Vegas, killing 58 people and wounding over 500 more. The gunman equipped his weapons with bump stocks, which allowed him to fire hundreds of rounds in a matter of minutes.”

Machine guns (fully automatic guns) are illegal. Should bump stocks, which enable a semiautomatic to fire a similarly rapid series of rounds, be illegal for the same reason? Of course. Who has the authority to make that law, Congress by statute or the the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) by regulation? Continue reading . . .

Is Murder a Violent Offense?

by · Jun 3, 2024 2:33 pm

To anyone with common sense, the title of this post seems to be a contender for the most absurd question that can possibly be asked. Yet, believe it or not, the U. S. Supreme Court today took up a case that asks that question, Delligatti v. United States, No. 23-825.

According to the government brief on the question of whether to take the case up, defendant Salvatore Delligatti was “an associate in the Genovese Crime Family,” who was hired to murder someone and then subcontracted the job. The plot failed when the police were alerted and arrested the subs. Among other crimes, Delligatti was charged with gang-related attempted murder in violation of the Violent Crimes in Aid of Racketeering Act, 18 U.S.C. § 1959, and “carrying a firearm during and in relation to any crime of violence,” 18 U.S.C. § 924(c)(1)(A).

Delligatti was convicted on all counts and sentenced to 25 years in prison, of which 5 years were for the § 924 gun charge. He argued in the trial court and on appeal that murder as defined in New York is not a “crime of violence” within the definition of § 924(c) because that definition requires physical force, and it is possible to commit murder in New York by failure to act when one has a duty to act, which does not involve physical force. Continue reading . . .

SCOTUS Unties ACCA Hemp Knot

by · May 23, 2024 11:19 am

In the Armed Career Criminal Act (ACCA), Congress prescribed severe punishment for people with extensive criminal records who violate federal gun laws. The priors are generally state offenses, so there is a problem matching up criminal laws from different jurisdictions. Under the “categorical” approach the Supreme Court has developed, mismatches often spring loose criminals whose actual conduct meets the definition of the crime that Congress sought to include, frustrating the intent of the law. The Supreme Court has had to decide many cases on this topic, and today’s decision in Brown v. United States is the latest installment.

This decision involves two cases, one from Florida and one from Pennsylvania. In both cases, the drug dealers in question dealt in drugs that remain illegal under federal law. Between the times of their state drug-dealing crimes and their federal weapons sentencing, though, the federal government narrowed its definitions of controlled substances so that the state and federal laws were no longer a perfect match. Should that get them off? Three justices voted for that undeserved escape on a technicality, but the majority of six did not. Continue reading . . .

Study Finds No Effect of Gun Buybacks

by · Nov 20, 2023 7:13 pm

The Philadelphia Inquirer has this op-ed by Temple University Professor Jerry Ratcliffe and grad student Marc Huffer. Their recently published study adds to the evidence that gun buyback programs are just for show and have no measurable effect on gun crimes. What’s the problem? The programs buy back the wrong guns. The guns the programs buy are brought in by law-abiding folks, while the criminals keep theirs. “Tellingly, Philadelphia’s Office of Forensic Science has never found a National Integrated Ballistic Information Network link to a crime with any gun surrendered in the city’s gun buyback program. Clearly, buyback firearms are not the ones causing such misery in the city.”

That’s consistent with what common sense told us all along, but “never” is a stronger result than I expected. Continue reading . . .

Supreme Court Narrowly Interprets Mandatory Consecutive Sentencing Statute

by · Jun 16, 2023 10:25 am

Most of the time, when a defendant receives more than one sentence in a single case the judge has discretion to run the sentences consecutively or concurrently. Concurrent sentences, in effect, eliminate the shorter sentence(s); the defendant will do the time for the longest-sentence crime and will not do a single day in prison more for committing the additional crime(s). Cheaper by the dozen.

Legislatures can mandate consecutive sentences in particular circumstances, though. One such mandate is found in the very long and very confusing federal firearm crime sentencing statute, 18 U.S.C. § 924. The U.S. Supreme Court tends to interpret limits on judicial discretion narrowly, especially in sentencing. Today it gave the limit in §924(c) the narrower of two possible interpretations. No surprise there. The decision in Lora v. United States, No. 22-49, was unanimous. Continue reading . . .

The myth of the “red state murder problem”

by · Aug 16, 2022 3:51 pm

After declining for over two decades, homicides in the United States increased sharply in 2015 and 2016. This slowed a little bit in the years that followed, until another dramatic increase in homicides occurred in 2020. In fact, the 30% increase from 2019-2020 is the largest ever recorded. By 2021, homicides rose another 5%. This uptick was not as striking as the one seen in 2020, though the numbers were still higher than pre-2019.

Continue reading . . .

What do federal firearms offenses really look like?

by · Jul 27, 2022 9:11 am

A recent report from the United States Sentencing Commission (USSC) published this month provided in-depth information on federal firearms offenders sentenced in 2021 under the primary firearms guideline, §2K2.1. This report is part of a larger series that examines various aspects of firearms offenses, such as mandatory minimum penalties and firearms offenders’ recidivism rates. USSC’s past research has found that firearms offenders are generally younger, have more extensive criminal histories, are more likely to recidivate, and are more likely to engage in violent criminal behavior. The number of firearms offenses has risen in recent years, and this report provides details that may be useful to policymakers. Continue reading . . .

Misleading numbers: Why are suicides and homicides lumped together under the “gun violence” umbrella?

by · Jul 21, 2022 3:21 pm

A recent article in TIME Magazine purports that “California’s answer to gun violence could be a model for the entire country.” In sum, the article states that California’s firearm violence has decreased over the last 20 years or so, relative to the rest of the country. They attribute this to the various gun legislation passed in California over the years that disrupted the manufacturing of cheap guns within the state, closed private sales loopholes, and restricted gun ownership for people convicted of a violent misdemeanor. But when looking at the actual data, these claims appear misleading.

Continue reading . . .