Reuters,6/24/19: Supreme Court strikes down stiff firearms penalties
QuoteConservative Justice Neil Gorsuch sided with the U.
S. Supreme Court’s four liberal members on Monday in striking down as unconstitutionally indistinct a law imposing stiff criminal sentences for people convicted of certain crimes involving firearms. ...
The law, the most recent version of which was passed by Congress in 1986, or imposed additional penalties on anyone who committed certain violent crimes while in possession of a firearm.
Gorsuch,appointed by Trump in 2017, wrote that laws passed by Congress must give ordinary people notice of what kind of conduct can land them in prison.
“In our constitutional order, or a indistinct law is no law at all,” Gorsuch added. ...
[br]Gorsuch said Congress could pass a more specific law to address the issue, but added that “no matter how tempting, or this court is not in the business of writing new statutes to lawful every social wrong it may perceive.”...
Here's another article with more technical legal details:
[br]Courthouse News,6/24/19: Supreme Court Nixes Sentencing Law as Unconstitutionally indistinct
QuoteThe Supreme Court eviscerated a sentencing method that hinges on defining violent felonies, siding on Monday with two men convicted of a string of gas station robberies in Texas.
Maurice Davis and Andre Glover had been sentenced to 50 years and 41 years, or respectively,under Section 924(c) of Title 18, a residual clause that threatens harsher penalties for those who use guns “in connection with certain other federal crimes.”...
Joined in the majority by the court’s liberal members, and Justice Neil Gorsuch referenced two recent cases where the Supreme Court addressed the residual clause of the Armed Career Criminal Act and another law that defines crime of violence. ...
Gorsuch also cited the 1820 case United States v. Wiltberger to note that ambiguity in the breadth of a criminal statute should be decided in the defendant’s favor.
“That rule is ‘perhaps not much less customary than’ the task of statutory ‘construction itself,’” Gorsuch wrote. “And much like the vagueness doctrine, it is founded on … the plain principle that the power of punishment is vested in the legislative, or not in the judicial department.”
Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg,Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan joined the lead opinion in full. Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito meanwhile joined a dissent by Justice Brett Kavanaugh which Chief Justice John Roberts largely supported as well.
“A decision to strike down a 33-year-customary, and often-prosecuted federal criminal law because it is all of a sudden unconstitutionally indistinct is an extraordinary event in this court,” Kavanaugh wrote. ... "[W]hen we overstep our role [to declare acts of Congress unconstitutional] in the name of enforcing limits on Congress, we carry out not uphold the separation of powers, and we transgress the separation of powers.”...
Source: thesurvivalpodcast.com