A Utah woman convicted of a felony for trying to cash a fake check in 2008 has taken her fight to own a gun to the U.S. Supreme Court.
This from msn.com.
Her attorneys filed a petition for review with the high court last week on this question: Whether the Second Amendment allows the federal government to permanently disarm petitioner Melynda Vincent, who has one 15-year-old nonviolent felony conviction for trying to cash a bad check.
Her lawyers wrote:
She has no history of violent behavior or other conduct that suggests she could not responsibly possess a firearm for self-defense.
And for more than 15 years, she has been a law-abiding citizen.
Vincent, a single mother with two advanced degrees who works as a licensed clinical social worker, wants to buy a gun to protect herself and to go hunting and target shooting with her family. But the conviction for attempting to cash a fraudulent $498.12 check at a Salt Lake grocery store prohibits her from ever possessing a firearm.
Vincent told the Deseret News when it first wrote about her case in 2020:
I can’t even be in a car with a bullet.
Since 1961, federal law has barred convicted felons from possessing a gun. A person found in violation of the law could be sent to prison.
Vincent sued the federal government and the state of Utah in 2020 to have her Second Amendment rights restored. (Utah has since changed its law to allow certain felons to possess firearms after seven years of good behavior.)
The law, according to the lawsuit, has offered her neither forgiveness nor redemption, but consigns her to a lifetime as a second-class citizen by permanently stripping her of her Second Amendment rights.
Vincent grew up in a poor, dysfunctional family where there was trauma and abuse. She started injecting and cooking methamphetamine at age 15. Her struggles with addiction and homelessness pushed her into committing crimes. After her arrest in 2007, she entered treatment for her drug and alcohol addiction and graduated from drug court.
A federal judge in Salt Lake City dismissed Vincent’s lawsuit in 2021, reasoning the laws prohibiting felons from possessing a firearm are presumptively valid. The 10th Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed the dismissal.
Vincent’s attorneys, Sam Meziani, Jeremy Delicino, and Jeff Green, argue in the Supreme Court petition that the 10th Circuit’s decision violates her Second Amendment rights because historical tradition of firearms regulation does not permit the federal government from disarming someone solely based on a nonviolent felony conviction.
The lawyers wrote:
That is especially true where no evidence suggests that the person poses, or ever has posed, a threat to anyone else.
In the filing, they contend that the 10th Circuit failed to apply a historical analysis mandated in a 2022 Supreme Court case, New York Pistol & Rifle Association v. Bruen. In that case, the high court held that gun restrictions are constitutional only if they are consistent with the Second Amendment and the nation’s historical tradition of gun regulations.
Meziani said there’s no historical basis for the 1961 law, adding a “modern” felony can be anything now. He said:
It’s our position and we’ve shown that nonviolent felons have never been deprived of firearms until 1961.
Meziani continued:
I think our case is the best vehicle in the country to decide this issue.
Should nonviolent felons have guns?
Whether the Supreme Court takes Vincent’s case remains to be seen. But the issue is of keen interest to Justice Amy Coney Barrett.
In a dissenting opinion in a 7th Circuit Court of Appeals case before she joined the high court, Barrett concluded that only people convicted of dangerous felonies should lose their right to keep and bear arms. She traced the history of the Second Amendment and the punishing of convicted felons to colonial times.
She wrote:
History is consistent with common sense that legislatures have the power to prohibit dangerous people from possessing guns, but that power extends only to people who are dangerous.
Further Barrett wrote:
In sum, founding-era legislatures categorically disarmed groups whom they judged to be a threat to the public safety.
But neither the convention proposals nor historical practice supports a legislative power to categorically disarm felons because of their status as felons.
