United States v. Hemani
Brief Details
- Case No.: 24-1234
- Brief Filed: January 30, 2026
- Jurisdiction: United States Supreme Court
Key Topics in the Brief
Briefs
Question Presented
Decision below United States v. Hemani, No. 24-40137, 2025 WL 354982 (5th Cir. Jan. 31, 2025)
Respondent argues that § 922(g)(3)'s "unlawful user" prong fails to provide fair notice and cannot be applied consistent with the Second Amendment to prosecute him for possessing a firearm based solely on his marijuana use. NACDL's brief offers a complementary analysis that focuses on how § 922(g)(3)'s indeterminacy operates in practice from the defense practitioner's perspective. Drawing on sentencing data and case examples, the brief demonstrates that § 922(g)(3) comprises only a small fraction of § 922(g) prosecutions and results in relatively lower sentences, reflecting its function not as a bulwark against dangerous individuals but as a prosecutorial leverage tool deployed when other charges cannot be sustained. The brief further argues that under Bruen and Rahimi, the government's historical analogues—vagrancy laws, civil-commitment laws, and surety laws—refute rather than support categorical disarmament. Each required individualized judicial process before restrictions attached, a temporal nexus between impairment and conduct, or both. Section 922(g)(3) has none of these features. Finally, the brief argues that while the statute is vague, if the statute is to be saved, the Fifth Circuit's temporal-nexus requirement offers one textually sound path forward, grounded in the statute's present-tense language and consistent with historical practice of regulating firearm use by the presently intoxicated rather than status-based categories of past users.
Author(s)
Adeel Bashir (Counsel of Record), Eleventh Circuit Vice-Chair, NACDL Amicus Committee; Federal Public and Community Defenders, Sentencing Resource Counsel, Tampa, Florida; Barbara Bergman, National Co-Chair, NACDL Amicus Curiae Committee, Washington, D.C.; Jeff Green, National Co-Chair, NACDL Amicus Curiae Committee, Washington, D.C.
