WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court unanimously rejected the prosecution of a Texas man on charges of purchasing a firearm while consuming marijuana Thursday, weakening a federal law used to convict former first son Hunter Biden.
In a unanimous ruling written by Republican-appointed Justice Neil Gorsuch, the high court agreed that the prosecution of Ali Danial Hemani violated his Second Amendment rights.
The court did not address the question of whether addicts who were currently intoxicated could purchase a firearm or whether any person under the influence of marijuana could be deemed too dangerous to posses a gun.
The justices also didn’t outright strike down the law, which was used to prosecute the younger Biden for purchasing a firearm while addicted to cocaine.
“We appreciate that drugs and guns can sometimes make for a dangerous mix,” Gorsuch wrote in the majority opinion.
“…[T]he government cannot carry the burden it has set for itself. We decide cases ‘based on the historical record,’” he added. “And the habitual drunkard laws on which the government relies here differ dramatically from [the statute in question’s] unlawful user provision on every single metric the government invites us to consider.”
Gorsuch also ripped into prosecutors for not analyzing whether Hemani’s use of marijuana made him unsuitable to go about armed.
Conservative Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito both penned concurring opinions, with the latter joined by liberal Justice Elena Kagan. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, appointed to the court by then-President Joe Biden, also wrote a concurrence backed by fellow liberal Sonia Sotomayor.
FBI agents had searched the home of Hemani, a dual citizen of the US and Pakistan, in 2022 under the suspicion that some of his family members were involved in “terrorism-related activities.”
Investigators ended up uncovering a handgun and marijuana that Hemani admitted he used “about every other day.”
Prosecutors later alleged that Hemani unlawfully possessed the Glock 19 9mm pistol while being an unlawful user of a controlled substance, but lower courts dismissed the case on Second Amendment grounds.
Hunter Biden was convicted in June 2024 under the same criminal statute as Hemani — as well as for two other gun felonies — but was pardoned that December by his father.
“Without aggravating factors like use in a crime, multiple purchases, or buying a weapon as a straw purchaser, people are almost never brought to trial on felony charges solely for how they filled out a gun form,” Biden had said in a Dec. 1, 2024, statement when granting the clemency. “… It is clear that Hunter was treated differently.”
A jury in Hunter’s home state of Delaware had found him guilty of making false statements about not abusing drugs or alcohol in order to purchase a revolver in October 2018.
At the time, the younger Biden was a crack cocaine addict, as he subsequently admitted in his 2021 memoir “Beautiful Things.”
The Supreme Court is expected to rule in the coming days on another Second Amendment case involving a Hawaii law restricting the carrying of handguns on private property without consent.
