The justices on Monday heard an appeal from a ME man who pleaded guilty in 2004 for having “knowingly or recklessly” caused or engaged in “offensive physical contact” with his girlfriend.
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He said that oral arguments only sway his fellow justices “in 5 or 10 percent of the cases, maybe, and I’m being generous there”. As a result, he was stripped of his ability to own a gun, because United States federal law indefinitely bars individuals convicted of “a misdemeanor crime of domestic violence” from owning firearms.
“The colloquy went back and forth several times with Thomas pressing the assistant solicitor general”, said Lithwick.
“Thomas’s question provoked an audible response from the audience, and caused Chief Justice John Roberts to “[swivel] his head in evident surprise”, according to one reporter present.
When federal investigators discovered his earlier conviction for domestic violence, they charged him with unlawful possession of a firearm.
For a decade, Clarence Thomas has sat on the US Supreme Court, making judgements in some of the country’s most important cases without asking a single question from the bench. Under normal circumstances, this wouldn’t be news, but for Thomas, it was the end of a 10-year silence. Supreme Court observers note that Thomas may find himself in a hard position on the court, given that the conservative judge finds himself in a almost evenly split court – with four generally liberal justices and four generally conservative justices.
Breyer and Justice Anthony M. Kennedy asked questions based on Thomas’s remarks.
The questioning started as the morning’s first argument was winding down and Ilana Eisenstein, a lawyer for the federal government, uttered a common concluding phrase.
Thomas piped up for the first time since February 22, 2006 – other than a brief quip uttered three years ago – with an extensive series of questions about Second Amendment gun rights.
He created a stir in 2013 when he made what seemed to be a light-hearted joke about lawyers trained at Harvard and his alma mater, Yale. He asked if the government could suspend someone’s right to ever publish again if they were convicted of a misdemeanor.
If anything, Thomas’ questions on Monday could be read as a sign that he misses his late colleague Antonin Scalia – whose empty seat, ceremonially draped in black, is directly next to his.
Thomas once said that those conversations make their way to the lawyers. Under our precedents, that is all that is needed for citizens to have a right under the Second Amendment to keep such weapons..
The Times notes that in his 2007, memoir My Grandfather’s Son, he wrote that he never asked questions while in college or law school and was intimidated by some of his peers. Alabama and other states backing Texas told the Supreme Court that states were within their rights to apply health regulations to clinics for the sake of patients.
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Thomas is silent no more.
