The attorney who secured a Supreme Court win paring back gun laws affecting marijuana users told the Daily Caller News Foundation Thursday the decision could signal how the justices plan to incorporate New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v. Bruen into its future decisions in Second Amendment-related cases.
The Supreme Court ruled Thursday in Hemani v. United States that a regular marijuana user could not be prosecuted under 18 USC 922(g)(3), in a 9-0 decision authored by Associate Justice Neil Gorsuch on Second Amendment grounds. Zachary Newland, the attorney whose firm represented Ali Hemani, said the high court’s decision reversed an apparent weakening of Bruen resulting from Rahimi v, United States, when it upheld the conviction of Zackey Rahimi for possessing a firearm while under a domestic violence restraining order.
“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,” Newland said. “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.”
In a 9-0 Opinion, the Supreme Court has thrown out the 922(g)(3) conviction of an individual convicted of possessing a firearm while being an unlawful user of drugs. The Court has held that without more evidence that an individual is rendered unusually dangerous by their unlawful… pic.twitter.com/hDllynC3n6
— SAF (@2AFDN) June 18, 2026
The Supreme Court’s Bruen decision invalidated New York’s “good cause” requirement for pistol permits in June 2022, with Associate Justice Clarence Thomas, who authored the court’s opinion, citing historical gun laws and the debate around the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment as reasons New York’s concealed carry law was unconstitutional. Two years later, Thomas was the lone dissent in the Rahimi case, when the high court upheld the conviction of a man charged with possessing a firearm while under a restraining order.
Newland told the DCNF his firm took up the case after the district court initially ruled in Hemani’s favor, adding that he felt the law Hemani was charged with breaking, 18 USC 922(g)(3), which prohibits those who use controlled substances including marijuana, could be targeted on Second Amendment grounds.
“I knew this statute, candidly, from the Hunter Biden prosecution,” Newland told the DCNF. “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.”
Biden was pardoned by his father, then-President Joe Biden, on Dec. 1, 2024, after he was convicted by a federal jury in Delaware for illegally possessing a Colt revolver while using drugs. In the case of Hemani, Newland said a crucial decision was how to challenge the law.
“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,” Newland said. “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.”
Newland also said that in this case, he also benefitted from the fact that the Hemani case had “better facts” than the Rahimi case decided in June 2024.
“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 said.
Rahimi had been involved in five shootings across December 2020 and January 2021, according to a ruling by the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, which overturned his conviction on Second Amendment grounds before the Supreme Court reversed it. Newland expressed hope for the chance to take another case to the high court.
“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,” Newland told the DCNF. “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.”
(DCNF)
