Meth conviction not sufficient to cancel gun rights, appeals court rules

A federal appeals court has overturned a gun possession conviction of a drug user, ruling that a prior felony conviction for having methamphetamine wasn’t enough to deny him his gun rights permanently.

The ruling by the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals is another dent in federal gun law, which contains a lengthy list of people whom Congress has deemed ineligible to purchase or possess a firearm.

Among those banned is anyone with a past felony-level conviction.

But the 5th Circuit, in a 3-0 ruling Tuesday, said a drug possession felony doesn’t rise to the level of “dangerousness” required to trigger the gun ban.

“We therefore find that the government did not meet its burden to prove that history and tradition support simple possession as a valid felony predicate,” wrote Judge Stephen A. Higginson.

The case comes after a series of Supreme Court rulings that have upended gun laws and court decisions.

The justices, in the Bruen case in 2022, ruled that for gun controls to survive constitutional scrutiny, the government must prove they would have been countenanced by early generations.

But in a 2024 ruling, the high court seemed to walk back Bruen, saying there need not be an exact match, but rather a similar purpose to an earlier law that would have seemed reasonable to the founding era.

Tuesday’s case involved Charles Hembree, who had a 2018 conviction for possession of methamphetamine. He was later found in possession of a gun, and the federal government charged him with being a felon in possession of a firearm.

He was convicted but appealed, challenging the law as applied in his case.

The Justice Department defended the conviction, saying that while the founding era didn’t have much to say about illegal drug possession, it did pass laws disarming “dangerous individuals.” It argued that drug-related crimes necessarily must be covered by that.

Judge Higginson said that might be true for drug dealing, but not necessarily possession.

The case is the latest from the 5th Circuit to challenge the scope of the gun prohibition law. It had previously ruled that the ban didn’t apply to a man whose previous felony conviction stemmed from growing marijuana. It also has ruled that while habitual marijuana use would be a bar, a single “present” instance doesn’t automatically trigger the gun bar.

Circuit Judge Don Willett agreed with the ruling but wrote a separate opinion questioning the legal underpinnings of section 922(g)(1) of Title 18 of the U.S. Code, which is the part that lays out the ban on felons possessing guns.

The law is built on Congress’s power to regulate interstate commerce, but Judge Willett said that’s an uneasy fit for a prohibition on a major constitutional right.

“In an appropriate case, I remain open to reconsidering whether § 922(g)(1) truly falls within Congress’s enumerated powers,” he said.