The devil’s in the details of the opinions.
We’ll have a lot more on the five decisions from the Supreme Court this morning, but one subtext is that today’s decisions are better news for Donald Trump’s appeal from his hush-money conviction than for Hunter Biden’s from his gun conviction. The decisions in Erlinger v. United States and United States v. Rahimi both arose out of 18 U.S.C. §922(g), the same statute that Hunter was convicted under, although his conviction was under Section 922(g)(3), which prohibits habitual drug users from owning guns; the defendant in Erlinger pleaded guilty under Section 922(g)(1) to being a felon in possession of a gun, while the defendant in Rahimi was convicted under Section 922(g)(8), which bars gun ownership by people under domestic-violence restraining orders.
The bad news for Hunter: The Court in Rahimi upheld the power of Congress to ban firearm ownership by certain types of dangerous people. That may not necessarily apply the same way to Section 922(g)(3), but it at least makes the task of challenging that law a lot more daunting. The good news for Trump: The Court in Erlinger held that the Constitution required, before applying a sentencing enhancement under the Armed Career Criminal Act, that a jury unanimously find the sentence-enhancing conditions of the statute: that Erlinger’s three predicate convictions were “committed on occasions different from one another.” That could bolster Trump’s argument in his case that New York violated the same constitutional rights by allowing a jury to convict him without being unanimous as to what “other crime” he was charged with concealing in order to elevate his misdemeanor conviction to a felony.
The devil’s in the details of the opinions. But surely, Trump’s lawyers will be mining Erlinger for good news this morning, while Hunter’s lawyers will be rifling through Rahimi looking for ways to distinguish it.