by Natalia Mittelstadt
The Supreme Court on Monday agreed to hear a case on drug users possessing firearms to determine whether the federal law criminalizing such possession is unconstitutional.
The Trump administration urged the court to hear the case, making it the latest regarding the Second Amendment that the court agreed to hear this term, according to The Hill news outlet. The court is expected to rule on the case by the end of its term next summer.
According to federal law, anyone “who is an unlawful user of or addicted to any controlled substance” is prohibited from possessing a firearm. Violating the law carries up to 10 years in prison.
“This is the archetypal case for this Court’s review,” Solicitor General D. John Sauer wrote in court filings.
The case the court will be hearing is the USA v. Hemani case. According to SCOTUS Blog, FBI agents obtained a search warrant and looked through Ali Danial Hemani’s house, where they found a pistol, “60 grams of marijuana,” and “4.7 grams of cocaine.” A federal judge threw out Hemani’s case after his appeal, citing the charges violated his constitutional rights, SCOTUS Blog said.
The judge relied on a U.S. Court of Appeals decision in the 2023 case of USA v. Daniels, which ruled against the same law in question in Hemani’s case, the SCOTUS Blog stated. The jury in the Daniels case found the defendant had been an active participant or recent participant in illegal drug use, according to SCOTUS Blog.
The court’s decision will impact federal and similar state-level measures that the Justice Department says have been implemented in more than 30 states.
Since the Supreme Court’s expansion of gun rights in 2022, lower court judges have split on the federal crime’s constitutionality.
The high court’s 2022 decision requires gun control measures to be consistent with the nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation. Some judges have since ruled the federal law unconstitutional in at least some applications.
Last year, the Supreme Court ruled a similar federal law that criminalizes gun possession for people under domestic violence restraining orders was constitutional.
The high court’s announcement comes after it ran out of funding over the weekend due to the government shutdown. The court building is now closed to the public, but the justices’ work on pending cases is continuing to proceed as normal.
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Natalia Mittelstadt is a reporter for Just the News. Zachery Schmidt is the digital editor of The Star News Network and contributed to this story.
