Hunter Biden Walks Free While This Iowa Man Serves 4 Years for the Same 'Crime'

The contrast between the two cases illustrates the haphazard impact of an arbitrary, constitutionally dubious gun law.

On December 1, 2023, after a bench trial in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Iowa, Alexander Ledvina was convicted of violating a federal law that bars illegal drug users from owning guns. Exactly a year later, President Joe Biden, whose administration had zealously defended that law in court, pardoned his son, Hunter Biden, for committing the same crime.

Ledvina, a marijuana user who was 26 when he was arrested, was sentenced to four years and three months in federal prison. Hunter Biden, a middle-aged former crack user, faced up to 25 years in prison after he was convicted of illegal gun possession and two related firearm offenses. But thanks to his father's intervention, he did not suffer any criminal punishment at all.

The president, who had repeatedly promised to refrain from intervening in his son's case, said he changed his mind because he concluded that the prosecution was politically motivated. That claim was puzzling because the prosecutor who pursued the gun charges, Special Counsel David Weiss, had been appointed by Biden's own attorney general. But Biden described the charges as highly unusual. "Without aggravating factors like use in a crime, multiple purchases, or buying a weapon as a straw purchaser, people are almost never brought to trial on felony charges" in cases like this, he said. "It is clear that Hunter was treated differently."

Ledvina agrees that Hunter Biden "was treated differently," but not in the sense that the president meant. "People are tried and imprisoned on these charges all the time, even absent other charges or a [criminal] background," he writes from the federal prison in Memphis. "Where is my pardon?"

Ledvina's complaint illustrates the wildly uneven impact of an arbitrary, constitutionally dubious gun law that is widely flouted and haphazardly enforced. Under 18 USC 922(g)(3), "an unlawful user" of "any controlled substance" who receives or possesses a firearm is committing a felony punishable by up to 15 years in prison. That ban, which Congress originally approved as part of the Gun Control Act of 1968, applies to all illegal drug users, including cannabis consumers who live in states that have legalized marijuana. Under Section 922(g)(3), it does not matter whether someone handles guns while intoxicated or otherwise poses a danger to public safety. To convict someone of this felony, it is enough to show that he uses drugs and possesses firearms, whether or not he ever mixes those two things.

A conviction for illegal gun possession also results in the permanent loss of Second Amendment rights under another provision of the same law, which bans gun possession by anyone convicted of a crime punishable by more than a year of incarceration. And people who falsely deny drug use when they fill out the form that must be completed to buy a gun from a federally licensed dealer, as both Ledvina and Hunter Biden did, can be charged with two additional felonies. 

A law that Joe Biden signed in 2022 created yet another potential charge for people who do what his son did. All told, the maximum possible sentences add up to nearly half a century behind bars under current law. Biden seems to think drug users who buy guns are committing a serious crime that merits a stiff prison sentence—except when his son does it.

Although people who commit that crime theoretically could go to prison for the rest of their lives, they rarely face all the possible charges, sentences typically are much shorter than the statutory maximums, and the vast majority of potential defendants are never prosecuted at all. Survey data suggest that something like 20 million American drug users (mostly cannabis consumers) own guns. Yet federal prosecutors filed charges under Section 922(g)(3) just 120 times a year, on average, from FY 2008 through FY 2017. So you have to be extremely unlucky to find yourself in that situation, which arises only when both your drug use and your gun ownership come to the government's attention.

Ledvina and Hunter Biden were both unlucky in that way. But while Biden had the good fortune to have a father in the White House, Ledvina had no such advantage, which explains why he is serving a four-year prison sentence for a crime that violated no one's rights.

That penalty is not only unjust; it is arguably unconstitutional. Prior to his conviction, Ledvina unsuccessfully argued that Section 922(g)(3) is unconstitutionally vague and inconsistent with the Second Amendment both on its face and as applied to him. He is now pursuing an appeal that reiterates those claims. Hunter Biden tried similar Second Amendment arguments before his trial, although his father's favoritism obviated the need for an appeal.

Ledvina's prospects in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit, which includes Iowa, are uncertain. But several federal courts in other circuits have rejected Section 922(g)(3) prosecutions of marijuana users on Second Amendment grounds. Applying the constitutional test that the Supreme Court established in the 2022 case New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, they concluded that prosecuting those cannabis consumers for gun possession was not "consistent with this Nation's historical tradition of firearm regulation."

Ledvina's fate hinges on whether he can persuade the 8th Circuit to embrace the logic of those decisions. The court declined to do so in April 2024, when it rejected a facial challenge to Section 922(g)(3). But in February 2025, the 8th Circuit held in United States v. Cooper that specific prosecutions under that law can violate the Second Amendment, so there may be hope for Ledvina. Either way, the Supreme Court ultimately will have to decide whether categorically banning firearm possession by drug users, which is analogous to decreeing that anyone who drinks alcohol may not own guns, can be reconciled with the constitutional right to keep and bear arms.

'Incredibly Stupid'

Hunter Biden established one element of his guilt under Section 922(g)(3) by publicly discussing his crack addiction, which he detailed in his 2021 memoir Beautiful Things. The other element was provided by Hallie Biden, the widow of Hunter's brother Beau. After Hunter bought a revolver from a Wilmington, Delaware, gun shop in October 2018, Hallie, who had started dating Hunter in 2016, became concerned that he might harm himself. Her "incredibly stupid" solution, as Hunter's lawyer described it during his trial, was to remove the gun from his pickup truck and toss it into a trash bin behind a grocery store.

When Hallie came back to recover the weapon, it was gone. She reported that fact to the grocery store, which is how the gun came to the attention of the Delaware State Police, the FBI, and federal prosecutors. "I told [her] that [she] needed to call the police and file a report that the gun had been lost," Biden said in a recent interview with the online news organization Channel 5.

Under a June 2023 deal that also would have resolved tax charges against Biden, Weiss agreed to refrain from prosecuting him for illegal gun possession if he successfully completed a pretrial diversion program. But that deal fell apart the following month under scrutiny by U.S. District Judge Maryellen Noreika, who viewed some of its provisions as legally problematic.

Although Noreika told the government and Biden's lawyers to try again, subsequent negotiations failed to produce a new agreement. Prosecutors "blew it up on purpose at the behest of the right wing," Biden claimed in the Channel 5 interview. Then Weiss obtained an indictment that added two new charges, both based on the form Biden filled out when he bought the revolver.

Among other things, that form asked whether Biden was "an unlawful user of, or addicted to, marijuana or any depressant, stimulant, narcotic drug, or any other controlled substance." He checked "no," thereby violating 18 USC 922(a)(6), which makes it a felony to provide false information in connection with a gun purchase. The same checkmark also violated 18 USC 924(a)(1)(A), which makes it a felony to provide a false statement "with respect to" information that gun dealers are required to record. Although the Justice Department concedes "there is considerable overlap in the conduct covered" by those two provisions, that did not stop Weiss from pursuing both charges.

Prior to Biden's trial, his lawyers asked Noreika to dismiss the gun charges as inconsistent with the Second Amendment. "The prosecution charges that Mr. Biden violated a rarely used statute that it claims prevented him from owning a firearm as an unlawful user of a controlled substance," they wrote, "but that statute's status-based prohibition on gun ownership recently was struck down as unconstitutional under the Second Amendment." They were referring to an August 2023 decision in which the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit overturned a marijuana user's conviction for illegal gun possession.

That case began with an April 2022 traffic stop in Hancock County, Mississippi. After Patrick Darnell Daniels Jr. was pulled over for driving without a license plate, police found a pistol, a rifle, and the remains of a few joints in his car. He was convicted of violating Section 922(g)(3) and sentenced to nearly four years in prison. That prosecution, the 5th Circuit ruled in United States v. Daniels, failed the Bruen test. "Our history and tradition may support some limits on an intoxicated person's right to carry a weapon, but it does not justify disarming a sober citizen based exclusively on his past drug usage," it said. "Nor do more generalized traditions of disarming dangerous persons support this restriction on nonviolent drug users."

Despite that seemingly relevant ruling by one of the country's most conservative appeals courts, Noreika rejected Biden's argument that Section 922(g)(3) is unconstitutional on its face. She noted that Daniels was limited to the specific facts of that case and that the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit had recently rejected a facial challenge to the law. As the 8th Circuit saw it in United States v. Veasley, the ban on gun possession by drug users was analogous to legal restrictions on "the mentally ill" during the 18th and 19th centuries. Although Noreika favored that take on the law, she said Biden, once convicted, could still argue that Section 922(g)(3) was unconstitutional as applied to him.

Biden's conviction seemed like a foregone conclusion. During a five-month sojourn in Los Angeles beginning in the spring of 2018, Biden recalls in his memoir, he was "up twenty-four hours a day, smoking [crack] every fifteen minutes, seven days a week." That fall, he writes, "I came back east" after "my most recent relapse in California, with the hope of getting clean through a new therapy and reconciling with Hallie." But he adds that "neither happened." He tried ketamine therapy in Massachusetts, but it was "disastrous," and he "backslid." He would "stay clean for a week, break away from the center to meet a connection I found in Rhode Island, smoke up, then return."

During Biden's 2024 trial at the federal courthouse in Wilmington, his lawyers nevertheless argued that he was not a drug user or addict when he bought the revolver on October 12, 2018, or during the 11 days he possessed it. Biden, who told Channel 5 he bought the gun "on a whim," never loaded it, and kept it in a lockbox, said he "checked that box" denying that he was an illegal drug user or addict because he viewed it as "a state-of-mind question" asking whether he was "right now addicted," which was not how he viewed himself at that moment.   

According to the prosecution, such quibbling was beside the point. Under federal regulations, the Justice Department notes, a buyer violates Section 922(g)(3) if he has used an illegal drug "recently enough to indicate that the individual is actively engaged in such conduct." Federal courts have said "a temporal nexus is required between the drug use and the firearm possession," it says. "Courts now examine the 'pattern and recency' of the defendant's drug use in determining if there is a temporal nexus between the possession of the firearm and drug use." But they "do not require contemporaneous use."

The jurors evidently took the same view. Unimpressed by Biden's parsing of exactly when he was using crack, they convicted him on all charges in June 2024.

Biden v. Biden

Biden was lucky he had bought a gun in 2018, four years before his father signed the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, which increased the maximum penalty for illegal gun possession from 10 years to 15 years. That law also created a new charge, likewise punishable by up to 15 years in prison, that could be deployed against defendants like Biden: "trafficking in firearms," which Congress counterintuitively defined broadly enough to cover drug users who obtain guns. If those changes had been enacted prior to Biden's gun purchase, he could have faced a maximum sentence of 45 years rather than 25. In the Channel 5 interview, Biden praised his father for his role in enacting "the first gun legislation…in a generation," apparently oblivious to its implications for firearm cases like his.

During the period when Biden was trying to resolve his gun case without going to jail, his father's administration was stubbornly defending the ban he violated against challenges by cannabis consumers. In one case after another, the government's lawyers argued that marijuana users have no Second Amendment rights, either because they are not part of "the people" whose right to arms is constitutionally protected or because disarming them is consistent with a historical tradition of forbidding gun possession by dangerous or untrustworthy classes of people such as "lunatics" and violent felons.

One of those cases involved Florida residents who wanted to participate in that state's medical marijuana program without surrendering their Second Amendment rights. In response to that lawsuit, the government averred that medical marijuana patients who own guns "endanger public safety in multiple ways." They "may mishandle firearms—or use firearms to commit crimes—because of 'drug-induced changes in physiological functions, cognitive ability, and mood,'" the brief said. They "may 'commit crime in order to obtain money to buy drugs'—and thus pose a danger of using firearms to facilitate such crime." And "violent crime may occur as part of the drug business or culture." 

That alarming portrait bore little resemblance to the plaintiffs in the Florida case, who included a septuagenarian business owner, an Afghanistan war veteran, and a retired police officer. The Justice Department implicitly portrayed all three as potential public menaces because they might be inclined to handle guns while stoned, commit crimes to support their drug habits, or (for some reason) buy marijuana from violent drug dealers instead of state-licensed dispensaries.

If those arguments seemed desperate, it was partly because the rationale for disarming cannabis consumers and other "unlawful" drug users has never been clear. When Congress enacted that gun ban in 1968, a Senate report mentioned "narcotic addicts," along with unsupervised "juveniles," "mental defectives," and "armed groups who would supplant duly constituted public authorities," as a category of people "whose possession of firearms" is "contrary to the public interest." As far as I can tell, the legislative debate did not include any attempt to elucidate the logic underlying that judgment, let alone to explain why it applied to occasional users as well as "addicts" or why, say, pot smoking raises concerns about gun possession that are qualitatively different from the concerns raised by alcohol consumption.

The rule that Congress viewed as obviously sensible in 1968 would have been incomprehensible to the Americans who ratified the Second Amendment in 1791, more than a century before the federal government began regulating drugs. Likewise for the legislators who extended the Bill of Rights to the states by ratifying the 14th Amendment in 1868, when Americans could legally obtain drugs such as cannabis, morphine, and cocaine without a prescription. It seems doubtful that Americans of that era would have thought eschewing such products should be a condition for exercising the rights protected by the Second Amendment.

That history posed a problem for the Biden administration's lawyers. Under Bruen, they were supposed to identify historical analogs that were "relevantly similar" to Section 922(g)(3), resembling it in motivation and scope. But the best they could do was cite laws enacted in the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries that prohibited people from publicly firing or carrying guns when they were under the influence of alcohol. In 1656, for example, Virginia prohibited "shoot[ing] any gunns at drinkeing." In 1771, New York made it illegal to fire guns during New Year's celebrations in light of the "great Damages" caused by trigger-happy people "intoxicated with Liquor." Between 1868 and 1883, Kansas, Missouri, and Wisconsin prohibited intoxicated people from carrying guns in public.

As several federal courts have noted, those context-specific restrictions were a far cry from a blanket ban that applies to people even when they are completely sober and even on their own property. "There is no tradition that supports disarming a sober citizen who is not currently under an impairing influence," the 5th Circuit noted in Daniels. "The Founders purportedly institutionalized the insane and stripped them of their guns; but they allowed alcoholics to possess firearms while sober. We must ask, in Bruen-style analogical reasoning, which is Daniels more like: a categorically 'insane' person? Or a repeat alcohol user? Given his periodic marihuana usage, Daniels is firmly in the latter camp. If and when Daniels uses marihuana, he may be comparable to a mentally ill individual whom the Founders would have disarmed. But while sober, he is like the repeat alcohol user in between periods of drunkenness."

The Supreme Court vacated the Daniels ruling in July 2024, instructing the 5th Circuit to reconsider the case in light of United States v. Rahimi, which upheld a prosecution for violating the federal ban on gun possession by people subject to domestic violence restraining orders. In January 2025, the appeals court reaffirmed its conclusion that Daniels' prosecution was unconstitutional. After Rahimi, the 5th Circuit noted, it ruled in United States v. Connelly that "the government could not constitutionally apply § 922(g)(3) to a defendant based solely on her 'habitual or occasional drug use.'" That case "controls this one," the court said. "Because the jury did not necessarily find that Daniels was presently or even recently engaged in unlawful drug use, we reverse his conviction again and remand." 

In addition to the 5th Circuit cases, federal judges in Oklahoma and North Carolina rejected Section 922(g)(3) prosecutions after concluding that the government had not met its burden under Bruen. In the latter case, U.S. District Judge Louise Flanagan went beyond dismissing a charge against a specific defendant, saying "the government has not met its burden of proving that [Section 922(g)(3)] is consistent with the Second Amendment." 

Hunter Biden undoubtedly would have cited those decisions on appeal, reigniting a legal dispute that pitted him against his own father. The president's pardon avoided that embarrassing situation while shielding Biden from the penalties imposed on less well-connected defendants.

During the Channel 5 interview, Biden emphasized the injustice of his prosecution, noting that marijuana users "buy guns every single day" and that "it is equally against the law" for them to "check that box" or "own a gun." While it is true that only a tiny percentage of such cannabis consumers are ever prosecuted, those who are can suffer severe consequences, as Ledvina's case shows.

'An Odor of Marijuana'

At a detention hearing in July 2023, Robert Friend, a special agent with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF), testified that Ledvina first came to the ATF's attention because of a tip from a "confidential informant" working for the Drug Enforcement Administration. According to Friend, that unnamed informant reported that Ledvina "was a distributor of cocaine and possessor of firearms." 

The government never confirmed that tip with surveillance, controlled buys, or physical evidence, and Ledvina was never charged with selling cocaine—or any other drug offense. But the ATF did ultimately confirm that Ledvina was a marijuana user. That fact, combined with his firearm purchases, was enough to make him guilty of federal felonies.

The evidence of Ledvina's cannabis consumption began to emerge in March 2022, when he reported a burglary to police in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. According to a joint stipulation of facts that Ledvina approved prior to his November 2023 bench trial, an officer "smelled an odor of marijuana coming from inside [Ledvina's] residence" and "observed multiple firearms." Local police evidently contacted the ATF, which Friend said was aware of that incident. 

On May 20, ATF agents searched Ledvina's trash (which according to the Supreme Court did not require a warrant). Among other things, they found "several cigar wrappers" and "loose tobacco," which Friend said was "consistent with taking the tobacco out of the cigar wrappers and replacing it with marijuana, commonly referred to as a 'blunt.'" They also found an empty ammunition box.

The ATF's suspicions were reinforced on July 29, 2022, when the owner of Black Dog Guns & Ammo in Marion, Iowa, reported that Ledvina smelled of marijuana during a pistol purchase that day. Two weeks later, ATF agents executed a search warrant at Ledvina's home, where they found two pistols, two rifles, about 13 grams of marijuana, and another 139 grams of "cannabis" that did not qualify as marijuana because its THC concentration was less than 0.3 percent, making it legal "hemp" under federal law. Ledvina, a self-described gun collector with a permit to carry a handgun, had a third pistol in his car.

Based on a warrant, the agents obtained a urine sample, which tested positive for marijuana and cocaine. Ledvina ultimately admitted that he had consumed cocaine in August 2022 and that he had "used marijuana five to six times a week" from March through July 2022. He also conceded that, when he completed the "Firearms Transaction Record" during the pistol purchase on July 29, he had checked "no" in response to the question about drug use.

Although the ATF seized Ledvina's guns on the day it searched his home, he was not arrested until June 2023, about 10 months later, at which point he was working as an I.T. technician at the V.A. hospital in Iowa City. He has been incarcerated since then. U.S. Magistrate Judge Mark A. Roberts declined to approve Ledvina's pretrial release, saying his continued confinement was necessary to guarantee future appearances and protect the public. That conclusion was dubious given that Ledvina had strong local ties, had a full-time job that required drug testing, and had made no attempt to leave the area for nearly a year after the ATF search—a period when he was not under any sort of government surveillance, despite the threat he supposedly posed.

A July 2023 superseding indictment charged Ledvina with illegal gun possession and making a false statement during a firearm purchase. He did not face any drug charges. His lawyer, Michael Lahammer, says the small amount of marijuana found by the ATF (less than half an ounce) probably explains that "discretionary choice by the U.S. Attorney's Office."

Lahammer urged U.S. District Judge C.J. Williams to dismiss the gun charges, arguing that "the government clearly cannot meet its burden to show that the Nation's history, particularly around the passage of the Second Amendment, supports firearm restrictions for those addicted to, or who unlawfully used, a controlled substance." Even if Williams concluded that Section 922(g)(3) "does not violate the Second Amendment on its face," Lahammer added, "the statute should not apply to a person like Mr. Ledvina, who was merely found with a controlled substance and who has no criminal history of using controlled substances." That "set of circumstances," he said, "is not 'distinctly similar' or even 'relevantly analogous' to founding era prohibitions on the right to bear arms."

It was predictable that Williams, who for nearly two decades had worked as an assistant U.S. attorney in the same office that was prosecuting Ledvina, would reject the argument that Section 922(g)(3) is unconstitutional on its face. Just two months earlier in United States v. Owens, he had concluded that the provision "does not violate the Second Amendment." In the 2010 case United States v. Seay, he noted in Owens, the 8th Circuit had rejected a facial challenge to the law, which it said expressed the intent of Congress to "keep firearms out of the possession of drug abusers, a dangerous class of individuals." 

Williams conceded that Seay predated Bruen and "did not conduct the type of historic[al] analysis" required by that ruling. But he agreed with Stephen Locher, a judge on the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Iowa, that "nothing in Bruen expressly repudiates the holding of Seay." Unless and until the 8th Circuit reconsiders its approval of Section 922(g)(3), Williams wrote, "this Court must treat Seay as binding precedent."

Even without that precedent, Williams added, it seemed clear that the ban met the Bruen test. He noted that the 8th Circuit "conducted a more thorough historic[al] analysis of the regulation of firearms as it relates to dangerous people during the Founding era" in the 2011 case United States v. Bena, which involved the same provision that the Supreme Court would later uphold in Rahimi. In Bena, Williams wrote, the 8th Circuit "concluded there was 'a common-law tradition that permits restrictions directed at citizens who are not law-abiding and responsible.'" And even after Bruen, he said, "numerous other district courts have reaffirmed the conclusion that Section 922(g)(3) is constitutional."

'Consider the 80-Year-Old Grandmother'

Ruling against Ledvina's motion to dismiss in August 2023, Williams repeated his reasoning from Owens verbatim. He did not mention the 5th Circuit's ruling in Daniels, which had been published a week earlier. But Williams said Ledvina could pursue a narrower, as-applied challenge after conviction. Lahammer argues that the firearm charges were unconstitutional in Ledvina's case because the government never proved "he was actively intoxicated or under the influence of marijuana at any time" when he was handling a gun. Although "intoxicants existed at the founding," Lahammer writes in his appeal brief (which Ledvina supplemented with his own brief), "the government cannot establish that eighteenth century history supports stripping a man of his ability to defend himself because he possessed an intoxicant."

The 8th Circuit may be open to that argument, despite its ruling in Veasley, which was published less than five months after Ledvina's conviction. Like the 5th Circuit, the 8th Circuit did not think early laws aimed at drunken gun handling were "relevantly similar" to Section 922(g)(3). The 8th Circuit instead relied on the historical treatment of "lunatics," who during the 18th century could be confined by justices of the peace when they were deemed a threat to public safety. The appeals court also noted that states had begun to prohibit gun sales to people of "unsound mind" by the late 19th century. Together with "the even longer tradition of confinement," the 8th Circuit said, "these laws suggest that society made it a priority to keep guns out of the hands of anyone who was mentally ill and dangerous."

Those precedents, the appeals court concluded, amply justified Section 922(g)(3): "The 'burden' imposed by § 922(g)(3) is 'comparable,' if less heavy-handed, than Founding-era laws governing the mentally ill. It goes without saying that confinement with straitjackets and chains carries with it a greater loss of liberty than a temporary loss of gun rights. And the mentally ill had less of a chance to regain their rights than drug users and addicts do today. Stopping the use of drugs, after all, restores gun rights under § 922(g)(3)." The court thought the justification for Section 922(g)(3), "which is to 'keep guns out of the hands of presumptively risky people,'" is "also comparable."

The 8th Circuit perceived another relevant precedent for disarming drug users: laws that made it a crime to go armed "in terror of the people." In both cases, it said, "the decision to engage in illegal and dangerous conduct…is what leads to a temporary deprivation, which ends once the illegal behavior does."

Veasley nevertheless left open the possibility of as-applied challenges such as Ledvina's. "Not every drug user or addict will terrify others, even with a firearm," the appeals court conceded. "Consider the 80-year-old grandmother who uses marijuana for a chronic medical condition and keeps a pistol tucked away for her own safety. It is exceedingly unlikely she will pose a danger or induce terror in others. But those are details relevant to an as-applied challenge, not a facial one. For our purposes, all we need to know is that at least some drug users and addicts fall within a class of people who historically have had limits placed on their right to bear arms."

Less than a year later in United States v. Cooper, the 8th Circuit elaborated on that distinction. In Veasley, "we concluded that keeping firearms out of the hands of drug users does not 'always violate[] the Second Amendment,'" the court said. "Now the question is whether it sometimes can. The answer is yes."

That case involved LaVance LeMarr Cooper, who—like Ledvina—was convicted in the Northern District of Iowa after a bench trial based on stipulated facts. "One was that he smoked marijuana three to four times a week," the 8th Circuit noted. "Another was that he had done it two days before officers found a Glock 20 pistol in his car during a traffic stop. Based on those facts and a few others, the district court found Cooper guilty of being a drug user in possession of a firearm and sentenced him to 37 months in prison."

Given those circumstances, the appeals court thought, Cooper had a plausible argument that his prosecution was unconstitutional. "Nothing in our tradition allows disarmament simply because Cooper belongs to a category of people, drug users, that Congress has categorically deemed dangerous," the appeals court said. "Neither the confinement of the mentally ill nor the going-armed laws operated on an irrebuttable basis." Concluding that the district court had erred by ruling out an as-applied challenge, the 8th Circuit remanded the case for further consideration.

Aggravating Factors

"This is not, by any means, a close case," Williams wrote after Ledvina's bench trial at the federal courthouse in Cedar Rapids, rejecting Lahammer's argument that Section 922(g)(3) did not apply to his client or was so vague that Ledvina could not reasonably be expected to know that it did. "Based on the totality of the evidence, the Court is firmly convinced of defendant's guilt."

As a result of those convictions, Williams noted at Ledvina's sentencing hearing in June 2024, he faced "as much as 20 years in prison without parole." But federal sentencing guidelines recommended a much shorter prison term.

Ledvina's "base offense level" was 20, Williams explained, because "the offense involved a semiautomatic firearm capable of accepting a large-capacity magazine and the defendant was a prohibited person at the time of that possession." Ledvina received a "two-level enhancement" because "the offense involved between three and seven firearms." For purposes of sentencing, Ledvina conceded that he "shared marijuana" and therefore possessed it with the intent to distribute it (whether or not any money changed hands), which earned him a "four-level enhancement" because he possessed a firearm "in connection with another felony offense." But because he "went to a bench trial on a stipulated factual basis," he got credit for "acceptance of responsibility," which reduced his offense level by two.

After those calculations, Ledvina's offense level was 24. Given that he had no significant criminal record, that level corresponded to a sentencing range of 51 to 63 months, or about four to five years. But because that recommendation was not mandatory, Williams had the discretion to impose a sentence shorter than 51 months. He did not do that.

In settling on a punishment for Ledvina, Williams applied the "preponderance of the evidence" standard used during sentencing, as opposed to proof beyond a reasonable doubt, which is required for a criminal conviction. He therefore considered allegations that had not been proven at trial, based on his assessment of whether they were more likely than not to be true.

Williams attached considerable weight to the testimony of two witnesses who testified at the sentencing hearing, both of whom had substantial criminal records. Jay Larimer said he had bought cocaine from Ledvina and owed him $200. One of Larimer's neighbors, Michael Young, said he had seen Ledvina banging on Larimer's door, allegedly trying to collect that debt. Young said Ledvina had brandished a gun after he saw Young and another neighbor watching him.

In his sentencing memorandum, Lahammer argued that "the so-called victim's alleged harm is so minimal to non-existent that the state case was a simple misdemeanor [third-degree harassment] and was dismissed—on the state's motion—due to lack of evidence as at least one of the witnesses told the prosecutor they didn't even remember the incident." But Williams thought the alleged altercation was sufficiently alarming that it should figure in Ledvina's sentence.

Larimer also testified that, on one occasion when he and Ledvina were snorting cocaine together, Ledvina accidentally fired a gun. Although Larimer's vague account was the only evidence of such an accident, Williams accepted it at face value. "The fact that the defendant accidentally discharged a firearm when he was using drugs with Mr. Larimer," the judge said, "is another indication of why it is we don't want to have people that are using drugs have anything to do with dangerous instrumentalities like firearms."

That logic, of course, would apply with equal force to drinkers, who nevertheless are not covered by Section 922(g)(3). But Williams had already dismissed the constitutional relevance of that point, which the 5th Circuit had emphasized in Daniels.

Although the testimony from Larimer and Young influenced Williams' exercise of his sentencing discretion, the recommended range would have been the same even with no evidence that Ledvina had behaved carelessly or threatened anyone. And even if Ledvina had not faced a four-level enhancement for "another felony offense," his sentencing range would have been 33 to 41 months. In other words, he could have received a three-year sentence for nothing more than his status as a gun-owning marijuana user. That is still pretty severe, especially compared to the outcome for Hunter Biden. 

Joe Biden, you may recall, averred that drug users caught with guns "are almost never brought to trial on felony charges" without "aggravating factors." But it is hard to see "aggravating factors" in Connelly, the case in which the 5th Circuit rejected liability under Section 922(g)(3) based on nothing more than "habitual or occasional drug use." That case involved a Texas woman, Paola Connelly, who was charged with illegal firearm possession after El Paso police found marijuana and guns in her home while responding to a domestic disturbance.

Section 922(g)(3) cases often arise from such incidental discoveries of drugs and guns, which do not necessarily involve violence or other "aggravating factors." A Texas defendant, for example, was embarrassed to admit that he had accidentally shot himself in the leg, so he told Laredo police he had been attacked by an unknown assailant. A search of his home discovered small amounts of marijuana and cocaine, and after his arrest he admitted he was a drug user.

According to the Justice Department, other Section 933(g)(3) defendants have included a Mississippi man who "possessed a 9 mm caliber pistol while using methamphetamine daily"; a crack-using Delaware gun dealer who was searched after police saw his girlfriend urinating in a parking lot and found drugs on her; a man suspected of "involvement in the January 6th Capitol Riots" who was caught with a revolver and marijuana when his home in San Antonio was searched; a Tennessee man who was caught with cannabis and a handgun after police "smelled marijuana emanating from his apartment"; an Iowa man who had a rifle in his car when he was stopped for a traffic offense and deemed to be "under the influence of marijuana"; and another Iowa marijuana user whose house was searched after an altercation with a neighbor.

Although that last defendant was not charged with assault, he admitted in a plea agreement that he had waved a gun at his neighbor. Yet his prison sentence, six months, was much shorter than Ledvina's—a disparity that is especially striking because both men were prosecuted in the Northern District of Iowa. In that district, Lahammer says, federal prosecutors are "aggressive" in enforcing gun laws and are "not necessarily looking at aggravating factors" when they decide to charge someone under Section 922(g)(3). He mentions another client of his, Abyehun Teferi, who received an 18-month sentence after he "went to the range" with his wife and "got caught with marijuana on him." And as the 8th Circuit noted, LaVance Cooper, who was tried in the same district, received a three-year sentence based on little more than his gun ownership and his periodic marijuana use.

'A Lot of Potential'

At his June 2024 sentencing hearing, Ledvina, who had been in jail since his arrest a year earlier, apologized to "my community, my country, and most of all my family for the bad decisions I've made and the company I've kept." During the 10 months between the ATF search and his arrest, he reported, "I was consistently employed full-time and refrained from criminal activity." He hoped that Williams, by sentencing him to the time he had already served, would "give me mercy and see this as an opportunity to have a success story come from your court rather than another statistic lost in the criminal justice system."

Williams did not think such mercy was appropriate. When he sentenced Ledvina, then 27, to another three years of incarceration, the judge described him as "a bright guy" with "a good upbringing" who "did very well in school" and "had a lot of potential." His criminal history, Williams noted, was "not terribly troubling," limited to "a couple disorderly conduct things when he was 18 years old." Ledvina had "worked in the past," which Williams viewed as "encouraging," and by 2023, he "had gotten back into working hard, working legitimate jobs, demonstrating that he can work well," as reflected in his "letters of support."

Unfortunately, Williams said, Ledvina "decided to blow it and go off on a bender for several years, to deal drugs [a crime he was never charged with] and possess firearms that he had no business possessing." The "good news," the judge added, was that Ledvina "has all the tools" to succeed in life, "doesn't have to be who he is," and has "a lot of potential and a lot of future ahead of him."

Williams' parting words to Ledvina: "This doesn't have to define you in any way. You can set your own path after you get done serving your time, and I think you have a lot of potential and I hope you live up to it."

By Williams' own account, Ledvina had gotten his act together by the time of his arrest. He was working in I.T. and planned to complete a degree in computer science at the University of Iowa, where he had studied for a couple of years after high school. But Williams still thought it was necessary to derail that progress by sentencing Ledvina to prison for 51 months—a penalty that would not have applied but for Section 922(g)(3).

If Ledvina had been a drinker rather than a pot smoker, he would not have been in Williams' courtroom. That arbitrary distinction, never justified by logic or persuasive constitutional reasoning, is especially puzzling at a time when most Americans live in jurisdictions that have legalized marijuana—a policy supported by two-thirds of adults, including the president of the United States. But as long as the federal ban on marijuana remains in place and courts view it as sufficient justification for disarming Americans who defy it, unlucky cannabis consumers like Ledvina will continue to find themselves at the dangerous intersection between gun control and the war on drugs.