US appeals court to reconsider ban on felons possessing guns

 

 

 

July 18 (Reuters) – A U.S. appeals court has vacated a ruling that struck down a federal ban on felons owning firearms, prompting a conservative judge to claim his “Left Coast” colleagues want to “subvert” the U.S. Supreme Court’s holdings expanding gun rights.

The San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on Wednesday said a majority of its 29 judges had voted to vacate the three-judge panel’s ruling, opens new tab and have a larger panel rehear the case.

The May decision came from a panel comprised of only appointees of Republican presidents including U.S. Circuit Judge Lawrence VanDyke, who issued a rare dissent, opens new tab to the 9th Circuit’s decision to hear the case en banc, or by an 11-judge panel.

VanDyke, an appointee of former President Donald Trump, in his dissenting opinion said “a supermajority of our court is so predictably biased against firearms” and was trying to undercut the U.S. Supreme Court’s approach to interpreting the right to keep and bear arms in the U.S. Constitution’s Second Amendment.

The 9th Circuit, the largest of the 13 federal appeals courts, is dominated by 16 judges appointed by Democratic presidents, and VanDyke said whenever a panel upholds a party’s Second Amendment rights, the court votes to rehear the case.

He said it was inevitable now that the 9th Circuit would uphold the ban on felons possessing guns after the U.S. Supreme Court’s 8-1 ruling in June upholding a ban on people subject to domestic violence restraining orders having firearms.

Yet he said that ruling did not clarify the ban’s constitutionality and that the Supreme Court should have taken up one of several pending appeals raising that question rather than sending the cases back to lower courts to consider in light of its ruling in United States v. Rahimi.

“None of our current justices spent time in this circuit, so perhaps it is understandable that they would reasonably expect all lower courts to faithfully apply the entirety of their Second Amendment caselaw,” VanDyke wrote. “Let’s be clear: out here on the Left Coast, that is a fantasy.”

The decision VanDyke joined in May overturned the conviction of Steven Duarte, a California man with a criminal history who was charged with violating the ban after throwing a handgun out of a car window during a police traffic stop in 2020.

The three-judge panel had based its decision on a landmark 2022 ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court’s 6-3 conservative majority called New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen that changed the landscape of firearms regulation.

That ruling established a new test for assessing firearms laws, saying restrictions must be “consistent with this nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.” The 9th Circuit panel said the felon ban did not meet that test.

In June, though, the Supreme Court clarified that standard, saying a modern firearms restriction did not need a “historical twin” to be constitutional.

The case is United States v. Duarte, 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, No. 22-50048.

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Source: REUTERS