Tenth Circuit Upholds Gun Ban for Bad Check Despite SCOTUS Ordering Reconsideration

Writing one dangerous test for lower than $500 is grounds for everlasting disarmament, a federal appeals courtroom has dominated.

On Tuesday, a unanimous three-judge panel for the Tenth Circuit Courtroom of Appeals as soon as once more dominated towards Melynda Vincent, a Utah single mom who sought to revive her gun rights regardless of a 17-year-old conviction for financial institution fraud. It beforehand dominated towards Vincent however was tasked by the Supreme Courtroom with reconsidering the case in gentle of its most up-to-date Second Modification resolution in US v. Rahimi. The panel mentioned the Excessive Courtroom’s steering failed to vary the end result.

“Given this remand, we’ve freshly thought of the Second Modification declare and conclude that Rahimi doesn’t undermine the panel’s earlier reasoning or outcome,” Decide Robert E. Bacharach wrote in Vincent v. Bondi.

The ruling marks the final of the unique group of petitions granted, vacated, and remanded by the Supreme Courtroom within the rapid aftermath of its Rahimi resolution to be redecided by its appellate panel. Like all of the others, it, too, resulted in an unchanged final result. That would put added stress on the Courtroom to take up one other Second Modification case and provide additional readability on the contours of the Second Modification, as each the Division of Justice and gun-rights advocates have been asking it to do.

Vincent’s problem stems from a time when she was homeless within the mid-2000s and wrote a fraudulent $498 test at a grocery retailer. She was convicted of felony financial institution fraud in 2008 and sentenced to probation with out ever serving time in jail. Regardless of this, her conviction renders her completely ineligible to buy or possess a firearm underneath federal regulation. Now an employed social employee and mom, she is suing the federal authorities for the precise to personal a gun to guard her household.

In contrast to another circuits to judge Second Modification challenges to the federal felon-in-possession ban, the Tenth Circuit selected to not topic the regulation to the take a look at, historical past, and tradition-based take a look at established by the Supreme Courtroom in its 2022 New York State Rifle and Pistol Affiliation v. Bruen resolution. It additionally opted to not differentiate between violent and non-violent felons. As an alternative, it relied on dicta from the Supreme Courtroom’s Heller resolution and its personal precedent from the 2009 case US v. McCane.

That led the panel to dismiss Vincent’s problem the primary time it heard the case in 2023.

“Although Bruen created a brand new take a look at for figuring out the scope of the Second Modification, the Courtroom didn’t seem to query the constitutionality of longstanding prohibitions on possession of firearms by convicted felons,” Decide Bacharach, a Barack Obama appointee, wrote on the time.

Those self same components once more carried appreciable weight with the panel in its newest resolution Tuesday. It famous that the Courtroom’s Rahimi resolution didn’t explicitly overturn its precedent or recommend that restrictions on felons had been unconstitutional.

“One district courtroom in our circuit dominated that Rahimi had overturned McCane, counting on the absence of a historic inquiry,” Bacharach wrote. “However that courtroom and three different district courts have elsewhere concluded that McCane stays binding after Rahimi. We too conclude that McCane stays binding.”

In the end, the panel determined it was certain to achieve an analogous final result this time round.

“Rahimi once more acknowledged the presumptive lawfulness of those longstanding prohibitions, ‘like these on the possession of firearms by felons,’” Bacharach wrote. “Ms. Vincent argues, nonetheless, that the Second Modification protects nonviolent offenders like herself. However this argument is unavailable underneath McCane.”