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October 25, 2024

Notable new accounting of post-Bruen Second Amendment claims brought by 1,450 criminal defendants

This new Trace article, headlined "A Supreme Court Decision Claimed to Take Partisanship Out of Gun Cases. It Didn’t," provides a new accounting of Second Amendment cases since the Supreme Court transformed the applicable jurisprudence in its landmark 2022 Bruen decision.  The subtitle of the article highlights it general themes: "A Trace analysis of more than 1,600 rulings found that the Bruen decision has given judges remarkable leeway. The results have been starkly partisan."  

This article details that the vast majority of the post-Bruen rulings are in criminal cases, though I am not sure these reported data on these criminal cases make compelling the "starkly partisan" claim:

The Trace’s analysis identified 150 lawsuits seeking to overturn state assault weapons bans, age limits on buying firearms, licensing rules, and other gun restrictions. In these cases — many of which were brought by the National Rifle Association and other gun rights groups — Republican-appointed judges sided with plaintiffs 48 percent of the time. 

That is four times the rate of Democratic appointees, who did so in 13 percent of the cases they heard.

The remaining 1,450 rulings reviewed by The Trace involved criminal defendants, many of whom were using Bruen in an attempt to have their charges or convictions thrown out. In these cases, some Democratic judges have been sympathetic to arguments that gun regulations not only have little historical support but also disproportionately affect marginalized groups.

Democratic appointees have sided with gun rights claims in 30 out of the 525 criminal cases they’ve heard, or 6 percent. Two judges — Robert Gettleman and Staci Yandle, both in Illinois — alone issued 17 of those 30 rulings. By comparison, Republican-appointed judges ruled in favor of defendants in 22 out of 748 criminal cases, or 3 percent. (The remaining criminal cases were heard by nonpartisan magistrate judges.)

It seems there are two "outlier" Democratic appointees who may be rejecting many or most federal gun charges, whereas all other Democratic appointees are siding with gun defendants at nearly the exact same (very low) rate as Republican-appointed judges.  And, perhaps most notable, these Trace data show that, roughly speaking, there has been ten times as much post-Bruen Second Amendment litigation in criminal cases as in civil cases.

October 25, 2024 at 03:13 PM | Permalink

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