Justice Neil Gorsuch joined the liberal wing of the Supreme Court to invalidate a federal law imposing heightened penalties for the use of firearms in certain violent crimes.
Gorsuch, appointed by President Trump, split from his conservative colleagues in Monday’s 5-4 ruling, in which the Supreme Court found the law to be unconstitutional.
“In our constitutional order, a vague law is no law at all,” Gorsuch wrote for the majority. “Only the people’s elected representatives in Congress have the power to write new federal criminal laws. And when Congress exercises that power, it has to write statutes that give ordinary people fair warning about what the law demands of them. Vague laws transgress both of those constitutional requirements.”
The case involved two men, Maurice Davis and Andre Glover, convicted in a string of gas station robberies in Texas in 2014. Along with multiple counts of robbery, they were found guilty of two counts of brandishing a shotgun during a crime of violence.
Glover was sentenced to more than 41 years in prison and Davis to more than 50 years, with each sentence followed by two years of supervised release.
The law at issue in the case authorized stiffer penalties for a person who uses, carries, or possesses a firearm in a “crime of violence,” defined as a felony that “has as an element the use, attempted use, or threatened use of physical force” or “by its nature, involves a substantial risk that physical force against the person or property of another may be used.”
Under the law, violators faced a mandatory minimum sentence of five years in prison in addition to any sentence received for the underlying crime. The minimum sentence was increased to seven years if the offender brandished the firearm and 10 years if it were fired.
