SCOTUS Gun Watch – Week of 10/12/20

Because today’s a Supreme Court holiday, we won’t get the order list from last Friday’s conference until tomorrow at 9:30. When that list comes out we’ll be watching the Rodriguez case, which was relisted from last week’s conference. The rhetoric in the petition papers is heated (the petitioners call the decision below an example of the Ninth Circuit’s “distort[ion of] the law to avoid protection of Second Amendment rights” and refer to its “lawless disposition of cases involving the Second Amendment”), but the facts are straightforward: law enforcement seized firearms from the home of a man they took into custody for mental health reasons; the man became unable to lawfully possess those weapons, but some of the guns belonged to his wife and the state did not return them to her. The petitioner claims the initial seizure violated the Fourth Amendment and the later retention and refusal to return the guns violated the Second Amendment. While the facts are straightforward, the procedural history is not—the Ninth Circuit didn’t address the Second Amendment question because it ruled that claim was barred by issue preclusion based on prior state court rulings in the gun forfeiture action. That complication may be one reason the Court might hesitate before taking the case.

There’s also one new petition addressing the effect of a Rehaif error—where the district court failed to inform a defendant charged with violating 922(g) that the government is required to prove the defendant knew the status that made him ineligible to possess a firearm.