5th Cir. Says More on When Federal Ban on Gun Possession by Drug Users Is Unconstitutional
From Monday’s U.S. v. Daniels decision, written by Fifth Circuit Judge Jerry Smith, joined by Judge Don Willett:
Title 18 U.S.C. § 922(g)(3) bars an individual from possessing a firearm if he is an “unlawful user” of a controlled substance. A jury found that Patrick Daniels, Jr., was such an unlawful user, and a judge sentenced him to nearly four years in prison. But the jury did not necessarily find that Daniels was intoxicated at the time of his arrest, nor did it identify the last time Daniels used an unlawful substance. So we reversed the conviction and held that § 922(g)(3), as applied to him, was inconsistent with the Second Amendment. The Supreme Court granted certiorari, vacated, and remanded for reconsideration in light of United States v. Rahimi (2024).
After Rahimi, this circuit heard a similar challenge to a prosecution brought under § 922(g)(3). In that case, United States v. Connelly, we held that the government could not constitutionally apply § 922(g)(3) to a defendant based solely on her “habitual or occasional drug use.” That case controls this one. Because the jury did not necessarily find that Daniels was presently or even recently engaged in unlawful drug use, we reverse his conviction again and remand.
For more on Connelly, see this post. Monday’s decision adds:
This is a closer case than Connelly because, unlike Connelly, this case went to trial, and the facts at trial seemed to reveal a defendant who was often intoxicated while transporting weapons. Daniels admitted to using marihuana roughly half the days of each month. Officers twice saw him with guns and marihuana in his truck. The marihuana in his truck was burnt, that is, used. When he was pulled over, he had a loaded handgun within arm’s length and a loaded rifle in the back seat. If Connelly was an easy case because the defendant there merely used marihuana occasionally before bed while keeping a gun for home defense, this case is far less clear cut; all signs here point to a defendant’s routinely driving around town while intoxicated with loaded guns in his car.
Crucially, though, that is not what the jury instruction required the government to prove at trial. The jury was instructed that, to find that Daniels was an “unlawful user,” it need not find “that he used the controlled substance at the precise time he possessed the firearm” because “[s]uch use is not limited to the use of drugs on a particular day, or within a matter of days or weeks before.” Instead, the jury was instructed that it need only find “that the unlawful use has occurred recently enough to indicate that the individual is actively engaged in such conduct.” {The jury then unanimously found Daniels guilty “beyond a reasonable doubt of knowingly possessing a firearm … while knowingly being an unlawful user of a controlled substance.”}
his language dooms Daniels’s conviction. The jury did not necessarily find that Daniels had even used marihuana “within a matter of … weeks before” his arrest, but only that his use “occurred recently enough” to indicate Daniels was “actively engaged” in unlawful use. What precisely this means is nebulous, and we “resist[ ] inquiring into a jury’s thought processes.” What we do know is that the jury could have found Daniels guilty even while believing that he had not used marihuana for several weeks. This would mean that Daniels was convicted for exactly the type of “habitual or occasional drug use” that we said, in Connelly, could not support an indictment (let alone a conviction).
In other words, the government’s burden of proof was too low, as it was not requi
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