Split Ninth Circuit panel declares federal felon-in-possession criminal law unconstitutional as applied to non-violent offenders after Bruen

Yesterday, a split Ninth Circuit panel handed down a major Second Amendment ruling in US v. Duarte, No. 22-50048 (9th Cir. May 9, 2024) (available here), to become the second circuit to find that the Supreme Court’s Bruen ruling renders unconstitutional federal law’s criminal prohibition in on gun possession by nonviolent felons.   The 60-page opinion for the court was authored by Judge Bea, and here is part of how it starts:

18 U.S.C. § 922(g)(1) makes it a crime for any person to possess a firearm if he has been convicted of an offense “punishable by imprisonment for a term exceeding one year.”  Steven Duarte, who has five prior non-violent state criminal convictions — all punishable for more than a year — was charged and convicted under § 922(g)(1) after police saw him toss a handgun out of the window of a moving car.  Duarte now challenges the constitutionality of his conviction.  He argues that, under the Supreme Court’s recent decision in New York State Rifle & Pistol Ass’n v. Bruen, 597 U.S. 1 (2022), § 922(g)(1) violates the Second Amendment as applied to him, a non-violent offender who has served his time in prison and reentered society.  We agree.

We reject the Government’s position that our pre-Bruen decision in United States v. Vongxay, 594 F.3d 1111 (9th Cir. 2010), forecloses Duarte’s Second Amendment challenge.  Vongxay is clearly irreconcilable with Bruen and therefore no longer controls because Vongxay held that § 922(g)(1) comported with the Second Amendment without applying the mode of analysis that Bruen later established and now requires courts to perform.  Bruen instructs us to assess all Second Amendment challenges through the dual lenses of text and history….

At step one of Bruen, we easily conclude that Duarte’s weapon, a handgun, is an “arm” within the meaning of the Second Amendment’s text and that Duarte’s “proposed course of conduct — carrying [a] handgun[] publicly for selfdefense”— falls within the Second Amendment’s plain language, two points the Government never disputes. Bruen, 597 U.S. at 32.  The Government argues only that “the people” in the Second Amendment excludes felons like Duarte because they are not members of the “virtuous” citizenry.  We do not share that view.  Bruen and Heller foreclose that argument because both recognized the “strong presumption” that the text of the Second Amendment confers an individual right to keep and bear arms that belongs to “all Americans,” not an “unspecified subset.” Bruen, 597 U.S. at 70 (quoting District of Columbia v. Heller, 554 U.S. 570, 581 (2008)). Our own analysis of the Second Amendment’s publicly understood meaning also confirms that the right to keep and bear arms was every citizen’s fundamental right….

At Bruen’s second step, we conclude that the Government has failed to prove that § 922(g)(1)’s categorical prohibition, as applied to Duarte, “is part of the historical tradition that delimits the outer bounds of the” Second Amendment right. Bruen, 597 U.S. at 19. The Government put forward no “well-established and representative historical analogue” that “impose[d] a comparable burden on the right of armed self-defense” that was “comparably justified” as compared to § 922(g)(1)’s sweeping, no-exception, lifelong ban. Id. at 29, 30. We therefore vacate Duarte’s conviction and reverse the district court’s judgment entering the same. 

The 10-page dissent authored by Judge Milan Smith concludes this way:

The majority reads Bruen, a Supreme Court decision reviewing New York’s gun licensing regime, as an invitation to uproot a longstanding prohibition on the possession of firearms by felons. Bruen extends no such invitation.  As Justice Alito cautioned, Bruen decides “nothing about who may lawfully possess a firearm.” Bruen, 597 U.S. at 72 (emphasis added).

One day — likely sooner, rather than later — the Supreme Court will address the constitutionality of § 922(g)(1) or otherwise provide clearer guidance on whether felons are protected by the Second Amendment. But it is not our role as circuit judges to anticipate how the Supreme Court will decide future cases…. Until we receive contrary definitive guidance from the Supreme Court, or from a panel of our court sitting en banc, we are bound by our decision in Vongxay.

I respectfully dissent and express the hope that our court will rehear this case en banc to correct the majority’s misapplication of Bruen.

The location and timing of this ruling is almost as interesting as its substance.  Many hundreds of § 922(g)(1) cases are prosecuted in this big circuit each year, so the echo effects of this ruling could prove profound (though I would guess not that many involve persons with only nonviolent priors).  And, we are likely only weeks away from the Supreme Court finally handing down an opinion in the Rahimi case to address the application of Bruen to a different section of § 922(g). 

Most folks reasonably expect the Rahimi ruling to provide more guidance on how the Bruen Second Amdndment test is to be applied to broad federal criminal gun control laws.  I would expect coming Rahimi opinion will lead to the Ninth Circuit reviewing this important Duarte ruling in some way, though whether that is in the form of en banc review or panel reconsideration might turn on what Rahimi actually says.