On a Friday night in March 2020, Steven Duarte was riding in the back seat of a car that ran a stop sign in Inglewood, California. After two police officers responded by activating their patrol lights, Duarte opened a window and tossed out a pistol. As a result of that traffic stop, Duarte was sentenced to more than four years in federal prison for violating 18 USC 922(g)(1), which prohibits gun possession by anyone who has been convicted of a crime punishable by more than a year of incarceration.
Although Duarte's criminal record included four state offenses that fell into that category, all of them were nonviolent. Last year, a divided three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit overturned Duarte's federal conviction, ruling that Section 922(g)(1) was unconstitutional as applied to him. But last May, an 11-judge panel of the same court reversed that decision, concluding that Duarte's prosecution was consistent with the Second Amendment. Duarte is now asking the U.S. Supreme Court to take up his case and resolve a circuit split on the question of whether Section 922(g)(1) is unconstitutional as applied to people with no history of violence.
