The Supreme Court just ruled you can’t lose your gun rights for smoking weed. The real test is what happens to the people already locked up under that law. One of them gets out July 15.
When the Supreme Court ruled last week that you can’t lose your gun rights just for smoking weed, it answered one question and opened a bigger one. What about the people already sitting in prison for exactly that?
Alexander Ledvina is one of them. The Iowa man was 26 when federal agents arrested him in June 2023. He owned guns and, by his own admission, used marijuana five or six times a week. That was the case. He has been locked up ever since, serving a 51-month sentence, the same kind of charge that convicted Hunter Biden in 2024.
Ledvina is scheduled to walk out of a federal prison in Memphis on July 15, six days before his 30th birthday. Here is the part to get right: he is not getting out because of the Supreme Court. He is getting out on good-conduct and earned-time credits under the First Step Act, which were already in motion. As Reason’s Jacob Sullum reported, Ledvina actually wrote the letter laying all this out on the same day the court decided U.S. v. Hemani, before he even knew the outcome. The ruling won’t shorten his time. What it does is give him a real shot at erasing the conviction that will otherwise follow him for life.
The Door Hemani Opened
This is the part that did not make the first round of headlines. Hemani does not just limit future prosecutions. It opens a path to relief for people already convicted under 18 U.S.C. § 922(g)(3), the law that makes it a felony, up to 15 years, for an “unlawful” drug user to own a gun. The court said those prosecutions are unconstitutional when they rest on nothing more than the fact that someone uses a controlled substance. A lot of past convictions fit exactly that description, which means a lot of them are now open to challenge.
Ledvina was already most of the way there. Back in February, the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals vacated his § 922(g)(3) conviction and sent the case back down, ruling he deserved a chance to argue the law was unconstitutional as applied to him. “Without more,” Judge Ralph Erickson wrote, “drug use generally or marijuana use specifically does not automatically extinguish a person’s Second Amendment right.” The lower court then agreed to wait for the Supreme Court to rule in Hemani before going further. Now it has.
His case shows where the fight goes next, because it is messier than the clean version. At sentencing, the judge credited allegations that never went to trial: that Ledvina fired a gun accidentally while using cocaine, that he pounded on an acquaintance’s door over a debt, that he flashed a gun at a neighbor. Ledvina disputed all of it, and prosecutors never had to prove any of it. Under Hemani, that shortcut is the whole problem. Gorsuch left the door open for prosecutions backed by “individualized proof” that a specific person is dangerous. Untested allegations at sentencing are a long way from that.
The Catch-22 Nobody Solved
Here is the knot the ruling leaves behind. The court says weed users generally have a Second Amendment right to buy a gun. But the federal purchase form still asks whether you are an “unlawful user” of a controlled substance, and a cannabis consumer who checks “no” is still committing a separate crime, lying on the form. Ledvina was convicted on that charge too, and the 8th Circuit let it stand even while throwing out the gun-possession count.
So you can have the right to buy the gun and still go to prison for the paperwork you filled out to buy it. Sullum put the absurdity plainly: it would be bizarre for someone to have a constitutional right to own a firearm and still be locked up for answering “no” to a question designed to deny him that right. Courts have not untangled that yet.
The Government Is Already Moving
The machinery is shifting fast. The day after the ruling, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives posted on X that it is “reviewing the decision and assessing its impact” and that “additional guidance will be provided soon.” That is the agency that enforces § 922(g)(3), acknowledging the ground moved under it.
It does not stop there. ATF already had a revised version of the federal gun-purchase form in the pipeline to reflect medical marijuana’s new Schedule III status, and a separate rule, open for public comment through June 30, that would shrink who counts as an “unlawful user” in the first place. A broader DEA hearing on cannabis rescheduling begins June 29. Every piece of the federal apparatus is drifting the same direction at once.
The Human Cost That Doesn’t Reverse
None of this gives Ledvina back the two years. When he gets out, he still faces three years of supervised release and, unless he clears the record, a felony conviction that bars him from the very right the court just upheld. He earned a paralegal certification while locked up and wants to work at a law firm, though the record makes that hard. “I will then have to rebuild my life from scratch with the baggage of being a felon creating barriers for me,” he wrote.
His grandfather, a licensed gun dealer who taught him to shoot as a kid and the reason he is into firearms at all, died while he was inside. Ledvina had pictured surprising him the day he got out. That will not happen now. He sent along photos of his dog, “the closest thing I have to a child,” who has spent a quarter of her life without him. “As far as she knows I’m dead,” he wrote. “My mom says she used to just stare at my car as though she thought I was about to exit it.”
The Supreme Court decided that weed users are not, by default, too dangerous to hold a gun. The slower question is how many people locked up on that assumption get to walk it back, and how much of what they lost in the meantime is gone for good.
