•
A unanimous Supreme Court held on June 18, 2026 that prosecuting Ali Hemani under 18 U.S.C. 922(g)(3) violated the Second Amendment. The opinion is narrow by design, and the limits are the whole story.
On June 18, 2026, the Supreme Court held unanimously that the government could not prosecute Ali Danial Hemani under 18 U.S.C. section 922(g)(3), the federal statute that makes it a crime for an unlawful user of a controlled substance to possess a firearm. Justice Gorsuch wrote the opinion. The vote was 9 to 0.
Read the headline and you might think the statute is gone. It is not. The Court went out of its way to say so, and the boundaries it drew are more interesting than the result.
| Item | Detail |
|---|---|
| Caption | United States v. Hemani |
| Court | Supreme Court of the United States |
| Docket | 24-1234 |
| Argued | March 2, 2026 |
| Decided | June 18, 2026 |
| Vote | 9-0 |
| Opinion | Justice Gorsuch |
| Statute | 18 U.S.C. section 922(g)(3) |
| Disposition | Affirmed |
The FBI searched the Hemani family home in Texas in 2022 as part of an investigation into suspected ties to terrorist organizations. During the search Hemani handed over a firearm he kept in the house and directed agents to marijuana on the property. He told agents he used marijuana roughly every other day.
No terrorism charge followed. More than six months later the government charged him under section 922(g)(3) for possessing the gun while being an unlawful user of a controlled substance. The district court dismissed the indictment on Second Amendment grounds. The Fifth Circuit affirmed. The government took it to the Supreme Court, and lost there too.
The ACLU's case page collects the briefing, and SCOTUSblog tracks the docket.
Since New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v. Bruen in 2022, a firearm regulation survives Second Amendment review only if the government shows it is consistent with the nation's historical tradition of firearm regulation. The government has to point to relevantly similar historical analogues, not merely assert a public safety interest.
The government's analogues for section 922(g)(3) were laws disarming intoxicated persons and laws disarming groups thought dangerous. The problem, as the Court saw it, is the fit. Historical intoxication laws targeted people who were armed while actually impaired. Section 922(g)(3) as applied here disarmed a person for a pattern of use, with no finding that he was impaired when armed and no process before the deprivation.
The holding is that an automatic, status-based ban on firearm possession for anyone who regularly uses a controlled substance, without individualized proof of dangerousness and without any pre-deprivation process, is inconsistent with the Second Amendment.
The opinion describes itself as narrow, and the carve-outs are explicit. Nothing in the decision disturbs:
That list does real work. It tells lower courts that the defect was the automatic operation of the rule, not the government's interest in keeping guns away from impaired or dangerous people. A statute that required a finding of dangerousness, or a process before disarmament, would be evaluated differently.
Three consequences worth tracking.
Pending 922(g)(3) prosecutions will be re-examined. Defendants whose facts resemble Hemani's, regular use without impairment at the time of possession, now have a direct precedent. Defendants who were armed while impaired do not.
Charging practice will shift rather than stop. Expect the government to build records on contemporaneous impairment and dangerousness, because that is the ground the Court left open.
Congress could respond. A rewritten statute keyed to impairment or to an individualized finding would answer the opinion's objection. Whether that happens is a political question, not a legal one.
There is also a marijuana-specific dimension. Section 922(g)(3) reaches anyone who uses a substance that remains unlawful under federal law, which includes cannabis users in states where cannabis is legal under state law. Reason Foundation's commentary on the ruling focuses on exactly that population.
Supreme Court merits filings are free on supremecourt.gov. The litigation that matters now is in the district courts, where hundreds of section 922(g)(3) prosecutions and post-conviction motions will be recalibrated against this opinion. Those dockets are on PACER.
Search current filings here: 922(g)(3) firearm prosecutions. If you are tracking a specific district's response, case alerts will push new entries to you.
Because Bruen-era Second Amendment rulings vary noticeably by judge, pulling the assigned judge's prior firearm decisions before you brief is worth the ten minutes. That is what the judge lookup is built for.
A facial challenge argues that a statute is unconstitutional in all its applications. An as-applied challenge argues only that applying it to this defendant, on these facts, is unconstitutional.
Hemani is the second kind. That is why the statute remains on the books and why the opinion carries the carve-outs it does.
The practical consequence is that section 922(g)(3) prosecutions do not stop. They get sorted. A defendant who was demonstrably impaired while armed, or who has an established addiction, or who has a record of dangerous conduct, is on the other side of the line the Court drew.
The defendants who benefit are those charged on a pattern of use with no evidence connecting the use to the possession in time or in danger.
Two questions will be litigated immediately.
How much of a temporal connection between drug use and firearm possession is enough? The government will argue for a loose standard, the defense bar for something close to contemporaneous impairment.
What counts as a sufficient individualized finding, and who makes it? The opinion faults the absence of pre-deprivation process, which invites arguments about what process would be adequate.
Expect a circuit split within two years, and expect the Supreme Court to take a follow-up case that answers the first question.
The same term produced another decision resolving a constitutional question that had been building in the circuits for years, covered in Little v. Hecox. For a firearms case that turned on statutory jurisdiction rather than the Second Amendment, see the Luigi Mangione ghost gun charges. And for the separation of powers decision that reshaped agency structure the same month, read Trump v. Slaughter.