United States v. Hemani

Case background

Ali Hemani is a dual citizen of the United States and Pakistan who was born in Texas and has spent most of his life in the Dallas area, living with his parents and working a stable job. Suspecting Mr. Hemani and his family of terrorism-related activities, the government searched the family home in 2022. Mr. Hemani cooperated throughout: he surrendered a gun he kept in the house, pointed agents to some marijuana on the property, and, in an interview, told law enforcement that he used marijuana about every other day. More than six months later, relying solely on that admitted marijuana use, the government prosecuted Mr. Hemani under 18 U. S. C. § 922(g)(3) for knowingly possessing a gun in his home while being an unlawful user of a controlled substance. He moved to dismiss the indictment as a violation of the Second Amendment; the district court granted the motion, and after the government’s unsuccessful appeal to the Fifth Circuit, the Supreme Court agreed to review the case.

Questions Presented

(1) Whether 18 U.S.C. 922(g)(3), the federal statute that prohibits the possession of firearms by a person who “is an unlawful user of or addicted to any controlled substance,” violates the Second Amendment as applied to respondent.

Holding

The government’s prosecution of Mr. Hemani under § 922(g)(3)’s unlawful user provision is inconsistent with the Second Amendment. To overcome the presumption that the Second Amendment protects his conduct, the government had to show its regulation is consistent with the Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation, and it rested entirely on an analogy to historical “habitual drunkard” laws — vagrancy, civil-commitment, and surety laws. That analogy fails on every metric the government invited the Court to consider: those laws targeted people whose drinking left them practically incapacitated rather than anyone who merely used an intoxicant, they served purposes other than protecting the public from unusually dangerous persons, and they generally provided some process before a person lost his liberties, whereas § 922(g)(3) disarms automatically with no pre-deprivation process. Taken cumulatively, these differences are fatal to the prosecution. The decision is narrow: it does not address banning addicts or the presently intoxicated, other prophylactic laws Congress might adopt, the felon-in-possession provision, or a prosecution backed by individualized proof of dangerousness.

The Court

Justice Gorsuch delivered the opinion of the Court, in which Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Thomas, Sotomayor, Kavanaugh, Barrett, and Jackson joined. Justice Thomas filed a concurring opinion, writing separately to urge that § 922(g) be revisited as exceeding Congress’s Commerce Clause power. Justice Jackson filed a concurring opinion, in which Justice Sotomayor joined, reiterating her view that Bruen’s history-and-tradition test is unworkable. Justice Alito filed an opinion concurring in the judgment, in which Justice Kagan joined, agreeing the historical analogues were not relevantly similar but preferring to affirm on a narrower ground.

What this episode contains

This episode is an AI-narrated reading of the majority opinion in United States v. Hemani, written by Justice Gorsuch.

AI disclosure: The voice in this episode is AI-generated, using a machine learning model styled to loosely resemble the authoring justice. Tone, inflection, pacing, and emphasis are artifacts of the model and should not be attributed to Justice Gorsuch. The text being read is the Court’s published majority opinion, lightly adapted to improve readability for the spoken format.