Legal/Law/Criminal Justice and Reform

Supreme Court Declines To Hear Pot-Growing Felon’s Appeal On Gun Case

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The Supreme Court passed on a case challenging a federal law prohibiting felons from possessing firearms Tuesday.

On Oct. 5, the Supreme Court elected not to hear the case after Joseph Frederick Johnson formally appealed roughly two months after the high court issued its ruling in Hemani v. United States, which struck down the use of a gun charge because Ali Hemani was a regular marijuana user. However, despite the Hemani decision, the high court allowed charges of being a felon in possession of firearms and ammunition against Joseph Frederick Johnson, who was convicted of growing marijuana, to remain in place.

“As the amicus brief we filed in Johnson v US made clear, the proper metric by which people can be disarmed is a finding of actual dangerousness – not simply a felony conviction,” Second Amendment Foundation Senior Director of Legal Operations Bill Sack told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “Even ‘presumptively lawful’ gun prohibitions can be rebutted, and perhaps more importantly, must still be subject to the 2A analysis laid out in Heller and Bruen.”

“There is no historical support for permanently disarming everyone convicted of a ‘felony’ – a category of crime that has ballooned to orders of magnitude more expansive than the founders understood,” Sack continued.

The decision allows the ruling by the United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit to stand, even though there is a circuit split, with five other circuits following the Tenth Circuit’s reasoning while three circuits have ruled in favor of challenges.

The Supreme Court previously declined to hear an appeal by the Justice Department of a ruling by a three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, consisting of two Trump appointees and one Obama appointee, that invalidated Charles Hembree’s conviction for being a felon in possession of a firearm in a Jan. 27 decision due to Hembree’s 2018 conviction for possession of methamphetamine.