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Supreme Court appears likely to rule against Mexico in suit against gun-makers for cartel violence

homesafetytechpros — Sun, 23 Mar 2025 12:20:09 +0000

U.S. Supreme Court

Supreme Court appears likely to rule against Mexico in suit against gun-makers for cartel violence

March 5, 2025, 12:46 pm CST

The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday appeared likely to side with U.S. gun companies arguing that Mexico cannot sue over the flow of firearms into the country. (Photo by Luis Barron/Eyepix Group/Sipa USA via the Associated Press)

The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday appeared likely to side with U.S. gun companies arguing that Mexico cannot sue over the flow of firearms into the country because of a 2005 law providing gun-makers with immunity for third-party crimes committed with their products.

“After a nearly two-hour argument,” the Washington Post reports, “a majority of justices—if not a unanimous court—appeared likely to block the lawsuit from proceeding, with several suggesting Mexico had not shown a close enough connection between guns made in the United States and drug cartel violence.”

Several other publications also reported that the Supreme Court appeared sympathetic to gun company arguments, including Reuters, the New York Times, CNN and SCOTUSblog.

Mexico argues that the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act does not shield gun companies because they sell to “red-flag dealers” known for illegally selling to straw purchasers who traffic guns across the border. Mexico’s suit seeks injunctive relief and about $10 billion in damages, according to an ABA Journal case preview.

The suit cites a provision in the law that allows civil liability when businesses knowingly violate a state or a federal law regarding the sale or marketing of firearms or when the the companies aid and abet the violation. The violation must also be the proximate cause of the harm—in this case, drug cartel violence—that is the basis of the suit.

The 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals at Boston had allowed Mexico to pursue the suit.

Suit defendants Smith & Wesson and Interstate Arms, a gun distributor, asked the Supreme Court to overturn the 1st Circuit’s decision. Initial defendants included seven firearms manufacturers and one wholesaler, but a federal judge dismissed six of them for lack of personal jurisdiction while the cert petition was pending, according to a brief filed by the gun companies.

Noel J. Francisco, a Jones Day partner and a former U.S. solicitor general during President Donald Trump’s first term, argued for the companies.

Mexico “asserts that defendants are liable for every illegal sale by every retailer in America because they know that a small percentage of firearms are sold illegally and don’t do more to stop it,” he said. “If Mexico is right, then every law enforcement organization in America has missed the largest criminal conspiracy in history operating right under their nose, and Budweiser is liable for every accident caused by underage drinkers since it knows that teenagers will buy beer, drive drunk and crash.”

In an exchange with Catherine Stetson, a lawyer for the Mexican government, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson said the suit does not contend that gun companies violate any U.S. laws.

Instead, the suit allegations “just go to whether or not the defendant had knowledge that at the end of the day, … some dealers might be doing something wrong,” Jackson said.

The case is Smith & Wesson Brands Inc. v. Estados Unidos Mexicanos.

The SCOTUSblog case page is here.

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Trump-appointed judge appears to mock Kamala Harris

homesafetytechpros — Sat, 09 Nov 2024 03:42:35 +0000

Inset: Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris speaks at a campaign rally at Little Chute High School, Friday, Nov. 1, 2024, in Little Chute, Wis. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon). Background: U.S. District Judge Terry A. Doughty (YouTube).

A federal judge appointed by Donald Trump appears to have mocked Vice President Kamala Harris on Friday in an order related to a long-running and controversial social media censorship case.

“We now consistently proceed — burdened by what has been,” U.S. District Judge Terry A. Doughty wrote in the order, an apparent reference to one of the failed presidential candidate’s trademark and oft-repeated stump speech lines: “unburdened by what has been.”

Later in the order, the court also muses about “regime change” and how Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. might soon find himself in charge of a federal public health agency — calling that eventuality “relevant” and “wild.”

In the underlying case, Republican attorneys general in Louisiana and Missouri sued the Biden administration over a policy encouraging social media platforms to remove COVID-19-related misinformation — arguing that those requests violated the First Amendment.

On Independence Day in 2023, the district court issued a 155-page opinion and order that likened the Biden administration to an Orwellian “Ministry of Truth.” In an accompanying injunction, Doughty ordered federal officials and agencies to cease all contact with social media firms that could potentially interfere with free speech.

The administration appealed and lost — at first.

In September 2023, the conservative U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit agreed with Doughty that officials with the FBI, CDC, the White House, and the COVID-19 Response Team likely violated the First Amendment by “coercing and significantly encouraging” social media platforms to “censor disfavored” speech.

Days later, the Department of Justice went to the nation’s high court.

In the application for a stay pending appeal, Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar rubbished Doughty’s original order as “an unprecedented injunction installing the United States District Court for the Western District of Louisiana as the superintendent of the Executive Branch’s communications with and about social-media platforms.”

More Law&Crime coverage: Justice Alito really wanted to hear what RFK Jr. had to say in social media censorship case to ‘prevent the irreparable loss of his First Amendment rights’

Originally stylized as Missouri v. Biden, the case was later refashioned into Murthy v. Missouri — and then remanded back down to the district court level, a victory for the government. The majority opinion by Justice Amy Coney Barrett did not get to the merits of the controversy, however, and instead dismissed the case using the conservative standing doctrine — a judicial theory created by judges in the 1920s who sought to dampen the use and limits of constitutional redress by making it difficult for individuals to sue the government over perceived violations of their rights.

“The primary weakness in the record of past restrictions is the lack of specific causation findings with respect to any discrete instance of content moderation,” Barrett wrote. “The District Court made none. Nor did the Fifth Circuit.”

The opinion goes on:

The plaintiffs, without any concrete link between their injuries and the defendants’ conduct, ask us to conduct a review of the years-long communications between dozens of federal officials, across different agencies, with different social-media platforms, about different topics. This Court’s standing doctrine prevents us from “exercis[ing such] general legal oversight” of the other branches of Government. We therefore reverse the judgment of the Fifth Circuit and remand the case for further proceedings consistent with this opinion.

Now, on remand, Doughty is sticking to his guns.

“This case stems from Defendants’ violation of Plaintiffs’ First Amendment speech rights,” the order begins. “We held previously that Plaintiffs’ claims were likely meritorious and issued a preliminary injunction in their favor. The Fifth Circuit mostly agreed. But the Supreme Court did not.”

The heart of the order directs the parties to move forward with suggestions on how to accommodate “jurisdictional discovery.”

This, the court points out, is not merits-based discovery, but a way to suss out whether the claims can still be brought by finding a way to prove they do have standing. Doughty sums up the question facing the court as: “[W]hat is a district court to do when jurisdiction is neither certainly existent nor certainly non-existent?”

In real terms, the plaintiffs were given 14 days to come up with another bite at the apple, in terms of a standing argument; the defendants will then have 14 days to reply to those arguments.

Of course, the issues at stake in the litigation, the judge somewhat veeringly opines, might be rendered something not entirely unlike moot — though he does not use this exact legal term — in the near future.

“We end with the unignorable reality that regime change is imminent,” the order goes on. “However, to take dispositive action in this case based on regime change alone would be quintessentially speculative . . . speculation which is trebly prohibited by our standing requirements, our injunction requirements, and our discovery requirements. So we will not.”

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