Does Trump’s court pick favor guns for felons?

President Donald Trump’s Supreme Court nominee favors felons over gun safety, says U.S. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif.

Pelosi said nominee Neil Gorsuch has ruled against liberal positions on a litany of issues like employee rights, food and water safety, reproductive rights and guns. Gorsuch is a conservative federal judge for the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals, based in Denver.

“If you care about that for your children, he’s not your guy,” Pelosi said during a Jan. 31 town hall on CNN. “(Former Democratic Rep.) Gabby Giffords’ group, the group for responsible solutions relating to gun safety, said that he comes down on the side of felons over gun safety.”

Pelosi’s claim that Gorsuch “comes down on the side of felons over gun safety” caught our attention. Her office sent us a press release that Giffords’ gun control advocacy group, Americans for Responsible Solutions, put out along with the Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence.

“In his time on the 10th Circuit, (Gorsuch) made repeated efforts to weaken the federal law that’s prohibited felons from possessing guns for the past 50 years, a law that has saved thousands of lives and enjoys near-unanimous support among Americans and elected officials on both sides of the aisle,” wrote Robyn Thomas, the law center’s executive director.

“(Former Democratic Rep.) Gabby Giffords’ group, the group for responsible solutions relating to gun safety, said that he comes down on the side of felons over gun safety.” House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi at a Jan. 31 town hall

The Games-Perez case

The primary case in question is United States vs. Games-Perez. The defendant, Miguel Games-Perez, was a convicted felon, and he possessed a gun — an apparent violation of the federal law that bans felons from knowingly possessing guns. (Remember the word “knowingly.”)

Games-Perez, however, wanted to make the case that he shouldn’t be convicted because he didn’t know he was a felon. He said that the state trial judge who ruled on the prior crime (the felony) repeatedly suggested to Games-Perez that he wasn’t being convicted of a felony but instead a lesser charge.

In line with precedent, the 10th Circuit denied Games-Perez’s request. But Gorsuch disagreed.

Gorsuch said he believes the federal law is written in such a way

that a defendant must have both knowledge of being a felon and knowledge of possessing a gun in order to be convicted. Thus, Games-Perez should have the opportunity to make his case in court.

The upshot is that Gorsuch’s opinion did not say felons should be allowed guns or that the law violates the Second Amendment.

While this case has a gun component, Pelosi’s claim has it “quite backwards because I don’t think Gorsuch’s opinion is about guns. For him, it’s about treating people fairly before sending them to prison,” said Eric Citron, a partner at Goldstein & Russell who profiled Gorsuch for SCOTUSblog, and a self-described liberal.

The Reese case

Gorsuch’s 2014 decision in United States vs. Reese has also been cited against Gorsuch. But it takes a tremendous leap of logic to view this decision as an attempt to rethink the federal ban on gun possession by felons.

In this case, a court had convicted defendant James Reese of being a felon in possession of a firearm. But Reese appealed the decision to the 10th Circuit and won because the state of New Mexico had restored his civil rights. If a felon’s civil rights have been restored under state law, federal law allows the felon to legally own a gun.

The 10th Circuit’s decision was uncontroversial. The opinion was unanimous and written in just 300 words. Even the government attorneys who brought the original charges conceded “that Mr. Reese’s federal firearms conviction is unsustainable.”

Had the court come to a different conclusion, it would have been “appalling,” said Eugene Volokh, a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, School of Law, who clerked on the Supreme Court with Gorsuch.

Our ruling

Pelosi said Gorsuch “comes down on the side of felons over gun safety.”

There’s one case, Games-Perez, where Gorsuch wouldn’t immediately send the defendant, a felon, to prison for having a gun, despite the federal ban on felons possessing guns. But Gorsuch’s reasoning wasn’t about whether the law infringed on the defendant’s Second Amendment rights. Instead, he thought the law allowed the defendant an opportunity to make the case in court that the he didn’t know he was a felon.

Two other cases that came up in our research turned out to be irrelevant.

Pelosi’s statement contains an element of truth but ignores critical facts that would give a different impression.

We rate it Mostly False.

Nancy Pelosi