In a decision published Monday, the U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals reaffirmed that the federal government violated the Second Amendment in its prosecution of Patrick Darnell Daniels Jr. for illegally possessing a firearm because he also consumed cannabis.
Judges from the Southern District of Mississippi Court unanimously ruled that the government’s prosecution of Daniels Jr. for violating 18 USC 922(g) (3) – which makes it a felony for an “unlawful user” of controlled substances to possess a firearm – “is inconsistent” with the U.S.’s “‘history and tradition’ of gun regulation” and fails the test the Supreme Court established in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen (2022).
“The government has not pointed to sufficiently analogous historical laws to establish why Daniels himself should be considered presumptively dangerous. And, as explained, even had the government supplied sufficient historical briefing to support a theory of dangerousness, the jury instruction employed in Daniels’s trial was too open-ended to support his conviction because it left open the possibility that Daniels had not even unlawfully used a controlled substance in several weeks.” — United States of America v. Patrick Darnell Daniels, Jr. decision, 1/6/25
Daniels was arrested in April 2022 during a routine traffic stop in Hancock County, Mississippi after he was found with guns and a few joint roaches. He was convicted of illegal gun possession and sentenced to nearly four years in prison along with three years of supervised release. The conviction also meant that Daniels permanently lost his right to possess firearms. The 5th Circuit had vacated that conviction, citing the Bruen test, in August 2023, but the U.S. Supreme Court vacated that decision in light of the June 2024 decision in U.S. v. Rahimi, which upheld a law banning firearms possession by anyone subject to a restraining order for domestic violence, forcing the 5th Circuit to reconsider its ruling.
In February 2023, a federal judge in Oklahoma ruled the federal statute barring firearms ownership from cannabis consumers is unconstitutional and in April a federal judge in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas came to the same conclusion. Last year the 5th Circuit ruled that prosecutors cannot file gun possession charges against a Texas woman who admitted to being a cannabis user, that case (U.S. v. Connelly) was cited in the Daniels decision.
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