The Supreme Court ruled 9, 0 on Thursday that a regular marijuana user cannot be prosecuted under federal law simply for possessing a firearm, delivering a sweeping Second Amendment victory that the winning attorney says has restored the teeth of the Court's landmark Bruen decision. Justice Neil Gorsuch authored the opinion in Hemani v. United States, holding that without individualized evidence that a drug user poses unusual danger, the government cannot strip that person of the constitutional right to bear arms.
The case centered on Ali Hemani, a Texas man charged under 18 USC 922(g)(3), the same federal statute once used to convict Hunter Biden. Hemani acknowledged using marijuana every other day. For that alone, he faced up to fifteen years in a federal prison.
Every justice on the bench, from Gorsuch to the Court's liberal wing, agreed the prosecution could not stand. In a term already loaded with consequential rulings, the unanimity sent a clear signal: the government's power to disarm citizens has constitutional limits that Congress cannot simply legislate around.
Zachary Newland, the attorney who represented Hemani before the Supreme Court, told the Daily Caller News Foundation that the decision did more than free his client. It reinvigorated a legal framework that many in the legal profession had quietly written off after the Court's 2024 ruling in Rahimi.
"I think it breathed some new life back into Bruen because after Bruen and more importantly after Rahimi a couple of years ago, I think there was a general sense among the bar that maybe the court wasn't as committed to the principles enounced in Bruen. Maybe they weren't as committed to some of the results, which policy-wise ripple. But here, I think you really see a retrenchment of a majority that is invested in the Bruen framework."
That framework, established in the Court's June 2022 decision in New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v. Bruen, requires the government to justify any firearms regulation by pointing to historical analogues from the founding era and the period surrounding the Fourteenth Amendment's ratification. Justice Clarence Thomas authored that opinion, which struck down New York's "good cause" requirement for concealed carry permits.
But in June 2024, the Court upheld the conviction of Zackey Rahimi, a man involved in five shootings across December 2020 and January 2021 who had been barred from possessing firearms under a domestic violence restraining order. Thomas was the lone dissent. To many Second Amendment litigators, Rahimi looked like a retreat.
Newland saw it differently. He recognized that Rahimi's violent record made him a poor vehicle for expanding gun rights. The facts were too ugly to produce good law.
"The government was making much broader arguments here than they were in Rahimi and in Rahimi, it's bad facts when you have that, and bad facts make bad laws sometimes."
Newland told the Daily Caller News Foundation he first encountered Section 922(g)(3) through the Hunter Biden prosecution. Biden was convicted by a federal jury in Delaware for illegally possessing a Colt revolver while using drugs. Then-President Joe Biden pardoned his son on December 1, 2024. Newland was not involved in that defense, but the case put the statute on his radar.
"I knew this statute, candidly, from the Hunter Biden prosecution. I wasn't involved in that defense, but I was familiar with it and I thought, you know, just on first blush that it looks susceptible to challenge. I think it's very broad and I think it doesn't provide much due process legal protection for folks before potentially being stripped of your Second Amendment rights and facing 15 years in federal prison."
The breadth of that statute, enacted in 1968 as part of the Gun Control Act, as Breitbart reported, is staggering. It bars any "unlawful user of or addicted to any controlled substance" from possessing a firearm. No hearing. No individualized finding of danger. No judicial process at all. Just a blanket prohibition backed by a potential decade-and-a-half behind bars.
Newland chose his approach carefully. Rather than mount a facial challenge arguing the statute is unconstitutional in every application, he brought an as-applied challenge, arguing it was unconstitutional as applied to Hemani specifically. The move narrowed the target and shifted the burden.
"We made sure that we brought an as-applied challenge rather than a facial challenge, meaning an as-applied challenge is a challenge saying that the law is unlawful as applied to my client versus a facial challenge, which says it's unlawful in every instance. So that's one, you narrow the target there, right? And in some ways, you put it on the government rather than putting it on you."
A district court initially ruled in Hemani's favor. The government pursued further proceedings, and the case ultimately reached the Supreme Court, where the government lost unanimously.
Justice Gorsuch's majority opinion dismantled the government's central historical argument. The administration had pointed to old "habitual drunkard" laws as historical analogues justifying the modern ban on drug-using gun owners. Gorsuch found the comparison failed on every front.
National Review's legal analysis noted that those historical laws required some form of legal process before disarmament, while Section 922(g)(3) imposes an automatic ban with no individualized hearing. Gorsuch wrote that the government's analogy "fails under every measure it asks us to consider: The historical laws on which it relies targeted different kinds of people, did so for different reasons, and operated in different ways."
The opinion also took aim at the government's awkward position on marijuana itself. As Gorsuch put it, the federal government was "awkwardly positioned to suggest that the millions of Americans who now regularly use marijuana are categorically and unusually dangerous." Cannabis is now legal in some form in forty states, even as it remains illegal under federal law, a contradiction the government could not paper over.
During oral arguments earlier this year, Gorsuch had pressed the government's lawyer with a pointed hypothetical, as Fox News reported: "What if he took one gummy bear with a medical prescription in Colorado? Let's say he had one to help him sleep every other day. Disarm him for life?" The government had no satisfying answer.
The case created unusual political alliances. AP News reported that the Trump administration and gun-control groups lined up on one side, while the NRA and the ACLU found themselves on the other. The ACLU's legal director, Cecillia Wang, warned that the statute could "basically give federal prosecutors a blank check."
The unanimity of the ruling matters as much as its substance. After Bruen drew sharp dissents and Rahimi saw the Court pull back, gun-rights advocates had reason to wonder whether the history-and-tradition test would survive contact with difficult cases. Hemani answers that question, at least for now.
Justice Thomas, who authored Bruen and stood alone in dissent in Rahimi, also wrote separately in Hemani to signal further challenges to related gun restrictions, Breitbart reported. The Court's composition has not changed, but the consensus has broadened.
The ruling lands in a term where the Court has already reshaped significant areas of law. From unresolved cases on agency power and election law to decisions on firearms industry liability, the justices have shown a willingness to draw hard constitutional lines.
Newland, for his part, sees the work as deeply personal. He framed his involvement not as a policy preference for marijuana legalization, but as a constitutional commitment.
"I'm a big believer in individual liberties, and I'm a pretty big skeptic of government power in general, so I would love to be involved in more of those things and it's something that I think is important and that not enough people take seriously enough. Whether or not you agree with the policy concerns of current modern day law, I'm a big believer in the Constitution says what it says."
No discussion of Section 922(g)(3) can avoid the name that made it famous. Hunter Biden's conviction in Delaware for possessing a Colt revolver while using drugs put the statute in the national spotlight. His father's pardon on December 1, 2024, removed the legal consequences but not the political ones.
The New York Post noted that the Hemani case involved the same statute used against Biden, and that justices across ideological lines questioned its vagueness during oral arguments. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson asked whether the government was essentially "asking us to trust Congress' legislative judgment on whether unlawful drug users pose a high risk of misuse, but that this test doesn't provide us a way to check that in any meaningful sense."
The irony is hard to miss. The Biden family's preferred solution, a presidential pardon, was available only to the well-connected. Hemani, an ordinary citizen, had to fight his case to the highest court in the land. He won. But the system that nearly imprisoned him for fifteen years over marijuana and a legally purchased handgun remains largely intact for users of other controlled substances.
Several questions remain unanswered. The as-applied nature of the ruling means it does not facially invalidate Section 922(g)(3) for all drug users. How lower courts apply the decision to users of substances other than marijuana, and whether the government attempts new prosecutions with more individualized evidence of danger, will determine how far Hemani actually reaches.
The Court's recent decisions on firearms law have not all moved in one direction, and the next round of Second Amendment litigation is already taking shape.
But for now, nine justices agreed on something that should not have required a Supreme Court case to establish: the government cannot strip a constitutional right from millions of Americans based on a blanket statute, with no hearing, no finding of danger, and no due process at all.
The Constitution says what it says. It took a unanimous Court to remind Washington of that, again.