Neil Gorsuch sides with liberal justices in gun violence case decision

  The conservative blogoshere is up in arms today because Neil Gorsuch sided with the liberal Supreme Court Justices in a gun violence case because the law was too “vague.” Here is more:

The Supreme Court on Monday ruled 5-4 that a federal law allowing for gun convictions relating to “a crime of violence” was too vague.

The case involved a pair of men who were convicted on several felony robbery charges, but were also convicted under another federal statute that required significant mandatory minimum sentences for a “crime of violence.”

“In our constitutional order, a vague law is no law at all,” Gorsuch wrote. “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 given ordinary people fair warning about what the law demands of them.”

“Vague laws transgress both of those constitutional requirements,” he added.

Gorsuch wrote that the law in question “provides no reliable way to determine which offenses qualify as crimes of violence and thus is unconstitutional.” And he said that if the justices were to side with the government in the case, “we would be effectively stepping outside our role as judges and writing a new law rather than applying the one Congress adopted.”

  I have to be honest here, I have never heard of this law before but I can tell you this: if a gun law really is that vague then the law can be interpreted and abused by anti-gun prosecutors, and if that is the case than I have a hard time getting upset at this ruling. In fact I am more surprised that 4 liberal justices threw out a gun law…

malo periculosam libertatem quam quietum servitium