Supreme Court to hear Domestic Violence Case RE: gun seizure

Jfriday1961

Jfriday1961

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The Supreme Court hears arguments Tuesday in a case that could invalidate the federal law barring guns for anyone who is the subject of a domestic violence court order. If the federal law falls, so would similar laws in most states, and other important gun laws.

The defendant in the case, Zackey Rahimi, assaulted his girlfriend in a parking lot, and after realizing that a bystander saw the assault, he fired a gun at the witness, and threatened to shoot his girlfriend if she told anyone. Two months later, a Texas court granted her a protective order, suspended Rahimi's gun license, and warned him that possession of a gun while the order remained in effect is a federal felony.

Rahimi repeatedly violated the court order, threatened another woman with a gun and fired a gun in five different locations in a period of one month—incidents that ranged from shooting a gun repeatedly at another driver after a collision, to firing multiple shots in the air after a fast-food restaurant declined a friend's credit card. When police searched his residence, they found a pistol, a rifle, magazines, ammunition, and a copy of the protective order.

He pleaded guilty to charges of violating the federal gun law and was sentenced to six years in prison. But he continued to press his constitutional challenge, and ultimately the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the law is unconstitutional.


Links to story:

From the A.P. Website: Associate Press Story

From NPR: Supreme Court

From US Supreme Court Website: Court Docket Info Here
 
Schattenreiter said:
Ok. so how does any of that save his sorry butt. He still committed crimes with a firearm. He still should be in prison.
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I'm just guessing here, but he probably wasn't convicted of any real gun crimes. that's a lot of work, and it's easier to just drop the real charges and get him to plead guilty to a lesser charge.

so based on bruen, we're potentially looking at thousands and thousands of people getting their firearms back because the state never bothered to charge them - this is true of disorderly conduct charges, drug convictions, abuse, etc.

those of us in the gun community have LONG been screeching that dropping the heavy firearms charges to get plea deals on lesser charges is a very stupid idea. but we're just paranoid idiots...

As I understand it, this case is being pushed forward by the anti-gun folks. they know it will likely fail a bruen challenge, so they're pushing it up to scotus because they know the decision probably won't come back until next summer, just in time for election season. that will give them a couple months to make hay on gun control before november, try to run their re/election campaign platforms on in, and yell about the merits of packing the court with more liberals.
 
rdinatal said:
This may ruffle some feathers...

This is one example where the person should not be allowed to have any type of weapon. He should be locked up.
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Actually what should have happened is someone with a legally carried firearm should have capped his butt and saved taxpayer dollars. Oh and they should have been reimbursed for the ammo they used.
 
But Clark Neilly, Senior Vice President of Legal Studies at the Cato Institute, replies that Zackey Rahimi had not been convicted of any crime when he was first stripped the the right to have a gun by a state court judge in Texas and then sentenced to prison for having guns.

"The biggest problem with this law is that it allows somebody to be dispossessed of their firearms on the basis of a state domestic violence order without any showing that they actually engage in domestic violence," Neilly says.
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I hate that this case relies on such a dirt bag, but I agree with exposing the lack of due process that goes into a protective order.
 
Ferrisfan said:
I hate that this case relies on such a dirt bag, but I agree with exposing the lack of due process that goes into a protective order.
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a whole lot of civil right cases revolve around dirt bags. good folks aren't usually getting caught up in too many problems. bad people are trying to find ways to wiggle out of their mistakes.
 
rdinatal said:
This may ruffle some feathers...

This is one example where the person should not be allowed to have any type of weapon. He should be locked up.
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How and where would you draw the line on Second Amendment restrictions?

- does "shall not be infringed" mean what it says, or is it really meaningless?
- can Congress do whatever it pleases as long as it claims to be acting for the public good?
- does Bruen make sense in only allowing the kind of restrictions that were in place when the 2A was ratified?

While we might all agree that Rahimi was not a nice person, making up legal restrictions and pretending they are really not prohibited by the Second Amendment is sort of like being a little pregnant.
 
Mr. Rahimi declined an interview request, but court and police records paint a portrait of a troubled young man who turned to drugs and guns after growing up in poverty in a family that immigrated to Texas from Afghanistan. Painfully shy and overweight, he said he was a target for school bullies.


He felt financial pressure from a young age to help support his family, and he earned money by detailing cars, mowing lawns and moving appliances. He built a successful business flipping used cars, he wrote, before he “started hanging around the wrong crowd.” He began “smoking marijuana, drinking alcohol, doing pills and all type of mess.” can you say sleeper and WHOA look at the lack of bond..
 
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gc70 said:
How and where would you draw the line on Second Amendment restrictions?

- does "shall not be infringed" mean what it says, or is it really meaningless?
- can Congress do whatever it pleases as long as it claims to be acting for the public good?
- does Bruen make sense in only allowing the kind of restrictions that were in place when the 2A was ratified?

While we might all agree that Rahimi was not a nice person, making up legal restrictions and pretending they are really not prohibited by the Second Amendment is sort of like being a little pregnant.
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Part of this conundrum falls from the lefts positions of going hard on guns but soft on crime. If we went hard on crime this guy is unavailable to possess firearms for at least a decent length of time. But going soft on his crimes allows him the opportunity to access guns legally or illegally. I've argued this before. We can't argue the supremacy of the 2A without acknowledging that we just executed a lot of criminals at that time. You "might" get one chance after a felony. But most felons were executed. And we are unlikely to go back to that. So we get this gray area that has been created since the 2A was established were criminals are allowed to be among the public. So then what?

I don't exactly have a solution. But I see the problem.
 
chiefjason said:
Part of this conundrum falls from the lefts positions of going hard on guns but soft on crime. If we went hard on crime this guy is unavailable to possess firearms for at least a decent length of time. But going soft on his crimes allows him the opportunity to access guns legally or illegally. I've argued this before. We can't argue the supremacy of the 2A without acknowledging that we just executed a lot of criminals at that time. You "might" get one chance after a felony. But most felons were executed. And we are unlikely to go back to that. So we get this gray area that has been created since the 2A was established were criminals are allowed to be among the public. So then what?

I don't exactly have a solution. But I see the problem.
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Today, most felons are not executed as they were in 1791 when the 2A was ratified. Politicians posturing about getting tough on crime has resulted in a massive expansion of the number of crimes that are classified as felonies and a huge reduction in the seriousness of those crimes compared to the founding era.

One possible solution might be change 922(g) prohibitions that are now based on felonies and instead base them on capital offenses, which would be far closer to the reality of the founding era.
 
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rdinatal said:
Nothing to do with the 2ndA. The guy is dangerous and should be in jail.
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Whether Rahimi should be in jail is not a question before the Court; how the 2A is applied is most definitely before the Court.
 
rdinatal said:
If he was in jail would the 2ndA even be talked about in this case?
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Rahimi is in jail, as noted in a Huffpost article from a week ago, but the 2A would be the central aspect of the Supreme Court case regardless of Rahimi's incarceration status.
Rahimi is still locked up in Green Bay Jail in Fort Worth. He faces the looming possibility of sentences in his three aggravated assault cases that could range anywhere from two to 20 years.
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The case arose from a dispute over whether Rahimi's federal (weapons) sentence should be served concurrently or consecutively with sentences for state offenses. The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals initially ruled against Rahimi. However, the Supreme Court issued the Bruen decision about two weeks later, which caused the Fifth Circuit to reconsider. On reconsideration, the Fifth Circuit ruled that a domestic violence prohibition was unconstitutional, so there was no basis for Rahimi's federal conviction, which was vacated.
 
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john galt said:
Mr. Rahimi declined an interview request, but court and police records paint a portrait of a troubled young man who turned to drugs and guns after growing up in poverty in a family that immigrated to Texas from Afghanistan. Painfully shy and overweight, he said he was a target for school bullies.


He felt financial pressure from a young age to help support his family, and he earned money by detailing cars, mowing lawns and moving appliances. He built a successful business flipping used cars, he wrote, before he “started hanging around the wrong crowd.” He began “smoking marijuana, drinking alcohol, doing pills and all type of mess.” can you say sleeper and WHOA look at the lack of bond..
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I wasn’t able to find any info on him. Was his family an OhBummer import?

Are Arabs considered white/caucasion?
IMG_3132.jpeg
 
Stogies said:
It's not about this guy per se, it's about the principle.
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And that is exactly the point. Instead of prosecuting real crime and getting real criminals off the street they would rather visit this BS on the rest of us in the pretence of doing some thing useful.
 
This one scares me, I don’t think they’ll uphold the decision from the 5th, and to accomplish that they’ll tweak something else.
 
GymB said:
This one scares me, I don’t think they’ll uphold the decision from the 5th, and to accomplish that they’ll tweak something else.
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Our enemies are counting on it. It’s a win win for them either way. If it’s upheld, then they have extremist talking points. If it isn’t upheld then they win directly.
 
After listening to several commentators on the case as well as reading some of the articles and briefs, I personally believe that Rahimi should not have been charged and that 18 U.S.C. § 922(g)(8), which prohibits individuals from owning firearms if they are "subject to a court order that restrains [them] from harassing, stalking, or threatening an intimate partner" is unconstitutional.

However, I am also of the opinion that Rahimi should not have been allowed to posess firearms due to him being a dangerous person. Unfortunately too many times the government relies on blanket general provisions instead of doing the hard work to deprive someone of their god given rights.

A clear example is the Lewiston Maine shooter. Every indication prior to the shooting was that he was a dangerous person and should have been committed, had his firearms confiscated, and been unable to possess them. But the powers that be in the government were either too lazy, too overworked, or too stupid to do so and it resulted in the death of over ten people.
 
Hmmm...

I'll have to follow up on this one.

The problem here is who and what is taking this case to the Supreme Court. In general, most legal firms who push these cases to the Supreme Court tend to pick, shall we say, "uncomplicated" cases in which both the person and the events are not going to be innately perceived as "bad" or "in a bad light". Getting up to the Supreme Court is VERY expensive and time consuming. To go all that way while essentially gambling everything on a well documented dirtbag isn't a legal risk most legal firms are willing to take.

Take, for example, the historic Rosa Parks arrest and trial for civil disobedience for violation of the Alabama segregation laws for refusing to give up her seat for a white person on a public transportation bus. She was not the first, or only, person to protest segregation laws in this manner. However, the NAACP decided she was the best candidate to challenge these segregation laws in court because of both who she was (her history and behavior) as well as the specific circumstances (no violence, no riots, no loud protests, etc. Just a simple refusal to give up her seat just because she was black.)

While this case with Rahimi MIGHT result in an overturning of the laws on a very specific interpretation and instance, the fact remains that this guy is a stinking turd that's been basting in a swill of pig diarrhea on a hot, humid August afternoon in the middle of hog country. But it d*mn sure wouldn't be nearly such a disturbing case to take all the way to the Supreme Court if it had been one of, say, a clean cut, hard working guy who never missed a single child support payment but had been unjustly accused of domestic violence by a lying, cheating, vindictive ex-wife with a well documented history of such behavior.

We can hope for a favorable outcome as we view these things...but I wouldn't recommend holding your breath over it.
 
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RetiredUSNChief said:
The problem here is who and what is taking this case to the Supreme Court. In general, most legal firms who push these cases to the Supreme Court tend to pick, shall we say, "uncomplicated" cases in which both the person and the events are not going to be innately perceived as "bad" or "in a bad light". Getting up to the Supreme Court is VERY expensive and time consuming. To go all that way while essentially gambling everything on a well documented dirtbag isn't a legal risk most legal firms are willing to take.
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Rahimi's appeals of the original District Court sentencing and its initial affirmation by the Fifth Circuit were made by the Federal Public Defender's Office.

The DOJ petitioned the Supreme Court to overturn the final Fifth Circuit decision that the domestic violence restraining order prohibition in 18 USC 922(g)(8) is unconstitutional.

Both sides of the government have unlimited taxpayer money to spend on this case.

My personal suspicion is that the Federal Public Defender's Office was just going through the motions of "we did everything we possibly could" when the Fifth Circuit's change of direction after Bruen blew everything up.
 
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RetiredUSNChief said:
Hmmm...

I'll have to follow up on this one.

The problem here is who and what is taking this case to the Supreme Court. In general, most legal firms who push these cases to the Supreme Court tend to pick, shall we say, "uncomplicated" cases in which both the person and the events are not going to be innately perceived as "bad" or "in a bad light". Getting up to the Supreme Court is VERY expensive and time consuming. To go all that way while essentially gambling everything on a well documented dirtbag isn't a legal risk most legal firms are willing to take.

Take, for example, the historic Rosa Parks arrest and trial for civil disobedience for violation of the Alabama segregation laws for refusing to give up her seat for a white person on a public transportation bus. She was not the first, or only, person to protest segregation laws in this manner. However, the NAACP decided she was the best candidate to challenge these segregation laws in court because of both who she was (her history and behavior) as well as the specific circumstances (no violence, no riots, no loud protests, etc. Just a simple refusal to give up her seat just because she was black.)

While this case with Rahimi MIGHT result in an overturning of the laws on a very specific interpretation and instance, the fact remains that this guy is a stinking turd that's been basting in a swill of pig diarrhea on a hot, humid August afternoon in the middle of hog country. But it d*mn sure wouldn't be nearly such a disturbing case to take all the way to the Supreme Court if it had been one of, say, a clean cut, hard working guy who never missed a single child support payment but had been unjustly accused of domestic violence by a lying, cheating, vindictive ex-wife with a well documented history of such behavior.

We can hope for a favorable outcome as we view these things...but I wouldn't recommend holding your breath over it.
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Also, the Justices tend to take cases that they want to rule on. No idea what that might be in this case.
 
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