Seventeen years ago, Melynda Vincent was convicted of bank fraud because she paid for groceries with a bad check for $498. Although bank fraud can be punished by up to 30 years in prison under federal law, Vincent was sentenced to probation, which she successfully completed before earning three university degrees and launching a career as a social worker. In 2016, she founded the Utah Harm Reduction Coalition, which aims to "provide evidence-based interventions to aid people in reducing health and social harms associated with substance use."
Vincent, in short, has been law-abiding and productive for many years. But because her 2008 conviction involved a crime punishable by more than a year of incarceration, she permanently lost her Second Amendment rights under 18 USC 922(g)(1). That means she is not legally allowed to own a gun for self-defense or even possess one while hunting with her children. Those burdens, Vincent's lawyers argue in a Supreme Court petition, are unconstitutional as well as unjust. They say the case, Vincent v. Bondi, provides "an ideal vehicle" for resolving a circuit split on the question of whether the Second Amendment allows the government to disarm people based on nothing more than a nonviolent criminal conviction.
Section 922(g)(1) applies to millions of Americans with no history of violence. According to the Prison Policy Initiative, about 19 million Americans have felony records. In FY 2023, the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) reports, just 4.4 percent of federal felony convictions involved violent crimes. Older BJS data indicate that less than a fifth of state felony convictions involve violent offenses. Those numbers, Vincent's petition says, suggest that "over eighty percent of state offenders and over ninety-five percent of federal offenders have improperly lost their right to self-defense" because of Section 922(g)(1).
