Court Opinion

ID: 9931656
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2024-02-09 17:00:54.095041+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T12:25:16.909990
License: Public Domain

Appellate Case: 22-4074     Document: 010110997681        Date Filed: 02/09/2024     Page: 1
                                                                                 FILED
                                                                     United States Court of Appeals
                                        PUBLISH                              Tenth Circuit

                       UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS                      February 9, 2024
                                                                        Christopher M. Wolpert
                              FOR THE TENTH CIRCUIT                         Clerk of Court
                          _________________________________

 UNITED STATES OF AMERICA,

       Plaintiff - Appellant,

 v.                                                            No. 22-4074

 JONATHAN ALEXANDER MORALES-
 LOPEZ,

       Defendant - Appellee.
                       _________________________________

            APPEAL FROM THE UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT
                      FOR THE DISTRICT OF UTAH
                      (D.C. No. 2:20-CR-00027-JNP-1)
                    _________________________________

 Nathan Jack, Assistant United States Attorney (Trina A. Higgins, United States Attorney,
 and Jennifer P. Williams, Assistant United States Attorney, on the briefs), Salt Lake City,
 Utah, for Plaintiff-Appellant.

 Scott Keith Wilson, Federal Public Defender (Jessica Stengel and Bretta Pirie, Assistant
 Federal Public Defenders, with him on the brief), Salt Lake City, Utah, for Defendant-
 Appellee.
                        _________________________________

 Before CARSON, BALDOCK, and EBEL, Circuit Judges.
                   _________________________________

 BALDOCK, Circuit Judge.
                     ________________________________

        Federal law prohibits certain people from possessing firearms.           18 U.S.C.

 § 922(g). The portion of § 922(g) at issue in this appeal is subsection (g)(3), which
Appellate Case: 22-4074     Document: 010110997681         Date Filed: 02/09/2024     Page: 2

 in relevant part forbids any person “who is an unlawful user of . . . any controlled

 substance” from possessing a firearm. A jury convicted Defendant Jonathan Morales

 of violating § 922(g)(3). But post-trial, the district court granted Defendant’s motion

 to dismiss the charge as violative of the Fifth Amendment’s Due Process Clause.

 U.S. Const. amend. V.      According to the district court, subsection (g)(3)’s phrase

 “unlawful user” was unconstitutionally vague both on its face and as applied to the facts

 underlying Defendant’s conviction. United States v. Morales-Lopez, 2022 WL 2355920

 (D. Utah 2022) (unpublished).       The Government appeals.        Exercising jurisdiction

 pursuant to 18 U.S.C. § 3731, we first hold, based on binding precedent, that the district

 court erred in considering whether § 922(g)(3) was unconstitutional on its face. We

 further hold, again based on binding precedent, that the district court erred in determining

 § 922(g)(3) was unconstitutional as applied to Defendant’s criminal conduct.

 Accordingly, we reverse and remand with instructions to reinstate the jury’s verdict. 1

                                              I.

        Let us begin with the facts established at trial. Defendant Morales and Jose

 Amaya were partners in crime. On January 10, 2020, the two men were stealing firearms

 and ammunition from the Sportsman’s Warehouse in Midvale, Utah during morning

 business hours. Amaya served as point man and Defendant as lookout. Store employees

 1
     In United States v. Wilson, 420 U.S. 332, 344–45 (1975), the Supreme Court
 explained: “[W]here appellate review would not subject the defendant to a second
 trial, this Court has held that an order favoring the defendant could constitutionally
 be appealed by the Government. . . . Since reversal on appeal would merely reinstate
 the jury’s verdict, review of such an order does not offend the policy against multiple
 prosecution.” In other words, “where there is no threat of either multiple punishment
 or successive prosecutions, the Double Jeopardy Clause is not offended.” Id. at 344.
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 observed the two men on security video and phoned police. While Amaya gathered the

 ware, Defendant moved to the front of the store. Defendant exited the store and walked

 west, away from the parking lot. Amaya’s Nissan Altima, in which the two suspects had

 arrived, was parked across the street in a handicap space directly in front of the store.

        Meanwhile, a number of officers responded to the call of a robbery in progress.

 Dispatch informed officers that Defendant was leaving the store. Sergeant Chacon and

 Officer Wathen arrived on scene about the same time. Sergeant Chacon “observed a

 Hispanic male dressed in a black jacket, jeans, and a black hat which fit the description

 given.” The two officers ordered Defendant to the ground and he complied. During a

 Terry frisk, Officer Wathen recovered a loaded semiautomatic .40 caliber Smith &

 Wesson Shield handgun from Defendant’s waistband. 2 Investigation revealed Amaya

 had stolen the firearm found on Defendant from the same Sportsman’s Warehouse five

 days earlier on January 5. Officer Wathen handcuffed Defendant and placed him in the

 backseat of his patrol car.

        About the same time, Officer Jonkman arrived on the scene and parked his vehicle

 directly behind Amaya’s Nissan to “block it in.” While providing “over-watch security,”

 Jonkman witnessed Defendant acting suspiciously. Officer Jonkman testified:

        So I went back over by Officer Wathen’s patrol car. And shortly later I
        noticed [Defendant] in the back of the patrol car making some extreme
        movements. To me it kind of worried me, believing that maybe . . .
        somebody missed a weapon or something on him. But it looked like he
        was trying to maneuver something.

 2
   During this time, other responding officers were inside the Sportsman’s Warehouse
 arresting Amaya and dispossessing him of stolen firearms and ammunition.
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        So I actually moved myself to the front of the patrol car and spoke to other
        officers and said, hey, something’s going on in there. And it was
        determined that . . . [Defendant] was going to be taken out of the car and
        another search be done. . . .

        After he was taken out of the car, I noticed in between the back cushion of
        the seat and the bottom cushion a plastic bag sticking out about two inches,
        sticking out from in between the seats.

        Between the cushions behind where Defendant had been sitting, Officer Jonkman

 recovered a plastic baggy containing about 5.7 grams of methamphetamine. Detective

 Davis testified that in his opinion, in the absence of other evidence or factors indicating

 an intent to distribute, the 5.7 grams was intended for personal use. Officer Wathen

 additionally testified that his standard practice was to inspect and clean the backseat of

 his patrol car after an individual had occupied and vacated the seat. Wathen confirmed

 no one other than Defendant had been in the backseat of his patrol car that day.

        After securing Defendant and Amaya, officers turned their attention to Amaya’s

 Nissan Altima. Officer Bartholomew testified he saw what looked to be a glass pipe used

 for smoking drugs in the vehicle’s center console. Once officers impounded the vehicle

 and obtained a search warrant, they recovered the glass pipe which contained

 methamphetamine residue. Officers also recovered a butane lighter and baggy containing

 about 22.7 grams of methamphetamine from the driver’s door panel. This amount of

 methamphetamine, according to Detective Davis, “without other factors or indicators,”

 was “consistent with distribution.”

        Two months later, while Defendant was in custody awaiting trial, Officer

 Atkin interviewed him regarding a separate investigation apparently involving a drug

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 house and a drug dealer named Jesus. During this conversation, Defendant admitted to

 using drugs regularly in early December 2019, about a month prior to his arrest at the

 Sportsman’s Warehouse.       Defendant confirmed that he went to a house to use

 methamphetamine on the day in question, but his memory was unclear because he had

 been using and had not slept for a number of days. Defendant did not know who owned

 the house. Defendant mentioned he was purchasing user amounts of methamphetamine

 from Jesus around the same time. Defendant told Officer Atkin “yes, I have been—was

 buying from him.” Defendant continued: “I would see [Jesus] on the street . . . there

 were always people that I knew that would see me . . . , and they would ask me, ‘Hey,

 you want some?’ I would say, ‘Yes.’” Defendant also told Officer Atkin that he had

 smoked marijuana, still illegal in Utah, with Amaya at the latter’s invitation around

 December 6.

                                              II.

       At trial, the district court instructed the jury that an “unlawful user” of a controlled

 substance as the language appears in § 922(g)(3) is an individual who “had been using a

 controlled substance on a regular and ongoing basis at the time he was found to be in

 possession of a firearm.”     After the jury returned a verdict of guilty based on the

 foregoing evidence, the district court granted Defendant’s motion to dismiss the

 § 922(g)(3) count because, in the court’s view, subsection (g)(3) was unconstitutionally

 vague both on its face and as applied. Because the district court granted Defendant’s

 motion to dismiss as a matter of law upon an uncontested trial record, we review both its

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 constitutional rulings de novo. United States v. Wenger, 427 F.3d 840, 851 (10th Cir.

 2005); see also United States v. Copeland, 921 F.3d 1233, 1241 (10th Cir. 2019).

                                             A.

       Addressing Defendant’s facial challenge first, we observe that for over a century

 federal courts have adjudicated challenges to the constitutionality of penal statutes by

 relying on the general rule that a defendant to whose conduct a statute clearly applies

 may not pose a facial challenge to the statute. See, e.g., Broadrick v. Oklahoma, 413 U.S.

 601, 610 (1973) (citing cases). In other words, “[a] plaintiff who engages in some

 conduct that is clearly proscribed cannot complain of the vagueness of the law as applied

 to the conduct of others.” Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project, 561 U.S. 1, 20 (2010)

 (quoting Hoffman Estates v. Flipside, Hoffman Estates, Inc., 455 U.S. 489, 495 (1982)).

 Even where a statute threatens to chill the fundamental right to speech, a “plaintiff whose

 speech is clearly proscribed cannot raise a successful vagueness claim” to the face of the

 statute. Expressions Hair Design v. Schneiderman, 581 U.S. 37, 48 (2017) (quoting

 Holder, 561 U.S. at 20).

        All this makes perfectly good sense. The “first essential of due process of law” is

 grounded in the principle that where a person of ordinary intelligence may reasonably

 understand that the law proscribes his own conduct, criminal responsibility justifiably

 may follow. United States v. Davis, 139 S. Ct. 2319, 2325 (2019). “Void for vagueness

 simply means that criminal responsibility should not attach where one could not

 reasonably understand that his contemplated conduct is proscribed.” Parker v. Levy, 417

 U.S. 733, 757 (1974) (quoting United States v. Harriss., 347 U.S. 612, 617 (1954)).

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 After all, why should one to whom application of a statute is plainly constitutional be

 allowed to attack the law for the reason that it might be unconstitutionally vague when

 applied to hypothetical facts not before the court?

        Where the text of a statute applies to a violator’s conduct, either by its plain

 language or “settled interpretations,” these “violators certainly are in no position to say

 that they had no adequate advance notice that they would be visited with punishment.

 They are not punished for violating an unknowable something.” United States v. Lanier,

 520 U.S. 259, 267 (1997) (internal brackets, ellipses, and quotation marks omitted). As

 the Supreme Court has explained:         “Embedded in the traditional rules governing

 constitutional adjudication is the principle that a person to whom a statute may

 constitutionally be applied will not be heard to challenge that statute on the ground that it

 may conceivably be applied unconstitutionally to others, in other situations not before the

 Court.” Broadrick, 413 U.S. at 610 (emphasis added). We have long heeded this

 admonition.

        Consider United States v. Reed, 114 F.3d 1067 (10th Cir. 1997), where we

 addressed the very same facial challenge to § 922(g)(3) that confronts us today. We

 applied this traditional rule of constitutional adjudication to conclude that a vagueness

 challenge to § 922(g)(3) “cannot be aimed at the statute on its face but must be limited to

 the application of the statute to the particular conduct charged.” Id. at 1070. We

 explained the traditional rule applied “except in those rare instances where a legislature

 has enacted a statute which is so totally vague as to ‘proscribe[] no comprehensible

 course of conduct at all.’” Id. at 1070 n.1 (emphasis added) (quoting United States v.

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 Powell, 423 U.S. 87, 92 (1975)). But, we reasoned, § 922(g)(3) was not such a statute

 because it was “susceptible of a construction which would avoid the vagueness problem.”

 Id. at 1071.

        Although our decisions in this area have not wavered from these principles of

 construction, the district court had a different perspective. In Johnson v. United States,

 576 U.S. 591 (2015), the Supreme Court held that the residual clause of the Armed

 Career Criminal Act, 18 U.S.C. § 924(e)(2)(B), specifically its definition of a “violent

 felony,” was unconstitutionally vague for the purpose of sentencing enhancement. The

 district court became the first and to date only federal court to read Johnson as

 overturning a significant number of Supreme and Circuit Court precedents and telling us

 facial challenges to criminal statutes are now readily available to defendants. Morales-

 Lopez, 2022 WL 2355920, at *5 (opining that Johnson “allows a defendant to bring a

 facial challenge without regard to the particular facts of his case”). But neither Johnson

 nor its progeny can reasonably be read to support the district court’s conclusion. 3

 Sessions v. Dimaya, 138 S. Ct. 1204 (2018) (holding a residual clause, 18 U.S.C. § 16(b),

 defining “crime of violence” unconstitutionally vague); United States v. Davis, 139 S. Ct.

 2319 (2019) (holding a residual clause, 18 U.S.C. § 924(c)(3)(B), defining “crime of

 violence” unconstitutionally vague).

 3
    The Circuit Courts of Appeals to have addressed the question are uniform in their
 rejection of the district court’s view. At least seven Circuits have stated that Johnson
 did not affect the traditional rule that a facial vagueness challenge cannot be lodged
 against a statute. Rather, a vagueness challenge requires application of the statute to the
 facts of the particular case. See United States v. Lewis, __ F. Supp. 3d __, __, 2023
 WL 4604563, at *3 (S.D. Ala. 2023) (citing decisions from the Fourth, Fifth,
 Seventh, Eighth, Ninth, Tenth, and Federal Circuits).
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        The explanation is straightforward. These Supreme Court cases applied the so-

 called “categorical approach” to address the constitutionality of residual clauses

 providing for sentencing enhancements. See Taylor v. United States, 495 U.S. 575, 600

 (1990). Under the categorical approach, a court assesses whether a crime qualifies for an

 enhanced sentence “in terms of how the law defines the offense and not in terms of how

 an individual offender might have committed it on a particular occasion.” Johnson, 576

 U.S. at 596 (internal quotation marks omitted). To determine whether the crime with

 which a defendant was charged was subject to a sentencing enhancement under the

 residual clauses, courts “had to disregard how the defendant actually committed his

 crime. Instead, [courts] were required to imagine the idealized ‘ordinary case’ of the

 defendant’s crime and then guess whether . . . [the level of risk specified by the residual

 clause] would attend its commission.” Davis, 139 S. Ct. at 2326 (emphasis added).

 These Supreme Court decisions “teach that imposition of criminal punishment can’t be

 made to depend on a judge’s estimation of the degree of risk posed by a crime’s imagined

 ‘ordinary case.’” Id.

        Section 922(g)(3) has little in common with the respective residual clauses at issue

 in Johnson, Dimaya, and Davis. Such clauses are sui generis. Unlike § 922(g)(3), the

 residual clauses at issue in these Supreme Court decisions, as a matter of statutory

 construction, did not permit the Court to apply the clauses’ proscribed course of conduct

 to the actual facts of the defendant’s case. This is the critical distinction between those

 cases and the present one. In a routine vagueness challenge such as presented here, a

 court applies a statutory prohibition to the defendant’s “real-world” conduct. Because the

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  residual clauses in Johnson, Dimaya, and Davis did not permit the district court to

  consider the defendants’ actual conduct to determine the propriety of a sentencing

  enhancement, the traditional rule that a defendant to whose actual conduct a statute

  clearly applies may not successfully challenge it for vagueness is entirely beside the

  point. The Supreme Court’s observation in Davis, 139 S. Ct. at 2327, confirms our

  conclusion:   “[A] case specific approach would avoid the vagueness problems that

  doomed the statutes in Johnson and Dimaya. In those cases, we recognized that there

  would be no vagueness problem with asking a jury to decide whether a defendant’s ‘real-

  world conduct’ created [the modicum of risk of physical violence called for by the

  residual clauses].”

         Understandably then, neither Johnson, Dimaya, nor Davis had reason to address,

  let alone question, the indelible rule that a defendant whose own conduct is clearly

  prohibited by a penal statute cannot pose a facial challenge to the statute. The district

  court misread Johnson to “allow[] the defendant . . . to mount a facial attack on the

  residual clause without any showing that it was unconstitutional as applied to him.”

  Morales-Lopez, 2022 WL 2355920, at *4 (emphasis added). The Supreme Court was

  quite clear, however, that the residual clause as Congress wrote it did not permit the

  Court to consider the facts underlying the defendant’s crime. Johnson, 576 U.S. at 603–

  04. And neither did the residual clauses in Dimaya or Davis. Dimaya, 138 S. Ct. at

  1216–18 (plurality); Davis, 139 S. Ct. at 2327–29.

         In reaching its conclusion, the district court relied on the Supreme Court’s

  statement in Johnson that, contrary to language in some of its earlier opinions, a

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  purportedly vague statute is not necessarily constitutional on its face “merely because

  there is some conduct that clearly falls within the provision’s grasp.” Johnson, 576 U.S.

  at 602. According to the district court, “[b]ecause Johnson clarified that a statute can be

  facially void even if it could be constitutional under some factual scenarios, it stands to

  reason that defendants are no longer required to show that a statute is unconstitutional as

  applied to the facts of their cases.” Morales-Lopez, 2022 WL 2355920, at *4. But we

  explained in 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis, 6 F.4th 1160, 1190 (10th Cir. 2021), rev’d on

  other grounds, 143 S. Ct. 2298 (2023), a decision the district court never referenced, that

  the Court’s language in Johnson “described the standard for determining whether a

  statute is, as a matter of law, unconstitutionally vague—not the standard for determining

  when a party may bring a vagueness challenge.”

         In other words, the Johnson Court’s view that a statute need not be

  unconstitutional in all its applications for the statute to be vague on its face addresses

  what a defendant must show, or perhaps more accurately need not show, to wage a

  successful facial challenge where available. This bears upon a defendant’s burden of

  proof. This says nothing about who may raise a facial challenge. 4 We opined as much in

  4
     Prior to the district court’s decision, the three Circuit Courts to have addressed the
  matter post Johnson effectively rejected the district court’s reasoning and upheld the
  traditional rule of constitutional construction in cases involving facial challenges to
  § 922(g)(3).     United States v. Hasson, 26 F.4th 610, 619 (4th Cir. 2022)
  (“Johnson[‘s] . . . rejection of the vague-in-all-its-applications standard does not
  undermine the rule prohibiting defendants whose conduct a statute clearly proscribes
  from bringing vagueness challenges.”); United States v. Cook, 970 F.3d 866, 877 (7th
  Cir. 2020) (“Johnson did not alter the general rule that a defendant whose conduct is
  clearly prohibited by a statute cannot be the one to make a facial vagueness
  challenge.”); United States v. Bramer, 832 F.3d 908, 909 (8th Cir. 2016) (Per
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  Elenis, where we concluded the district court “correctly relied on Expressions Hair

  Design [137 S. Ct. at 1151–52] . . . , a case decided after Johnson, in which the Supreme

  Court reaffirmed that ‘a plaintiff whose speech is proscribed cannot raise a successful

  vagueness claim.’” 5 Elenis, 6 F.4th at 1190. If this is true in the First Amendment

  context, surely it is true in other contexts not calling for application of the “categorical

  approach.”

         In sum, the district court erred when it considered Defendant’s facial challenge to

  § 922(g)(3) based upon its view that the Supreme Court in Johnson upended the

  traditional rule that a defendant whose conduct is clearly prohibited by a statute cannot

  pose a facial challenge to the statute while ignoring his own conduct. The Supreme Court

  does not lightly overturn its own precedents and certainly not with language that—if the

  district court’s reading of Johnson were to prevail—could only be described as cryptic.

  Any change to a canon that the Supreme Court has “[e]mbedded in the traditional rules of

  constitutional adjudication,” Broadrick, 413 U.S. at 610, and whose foundation rests in

  Curiam) (“Though [after Johnson a defendant] need not prove that § 922(g)(3) is
  vague in all its applications, our case law still requires him to show that the statute is
  vague as applied to his particular conduct.”). Both the Fourth and Seventh Circuits’
  decisions, in particular, explain in much detail why today we reach a result consistent
  with their own. We do not create circuit splits without “sound reason” to do so and
  most assuredly no such reason exists in this case. United States v. Thomas, 939 F.3d
  1121, 1130–31 (10th Cir. 2019).
  5
     The Supreme Court’s decision in Elenis did not address this point. Making the
  district court’s failure to reference our decision in Elenis all the more puzzling is the
  fact that at the time the district court rendered its opinion in the present case, the
  Supreme Court had not yet rendered its decision in Elenis, thus making the entirety
  of our decision in Elenis still good law at that point—and clearly binding on the
  district court.
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  years of Supreme Court precedent must come in no uncertain terms from the Supreme

  Court itself. To tell us when its longstanding precedents, precedents on which inferior

  federal courts have long relied, are no longer good law is the sole prerogative of the

  Supreme Court. State Oil Co. v. Khan, 522 U.S. 3, 20 (1997) (“[I]t is this Court’s

  prerogative alone to overrule . . . its precedents.”).

                                                      B.

         This leaves us with Defendant’s as-applied challenge to § 922(g)(3). The district

  court recognized it need not reach Defendant’s as-applied challenge after ruling the

  statute was unconstitutionally vague on its face. The court continued on, however,

  explaining that “if forced to review [§ 922(g)(3)] under an as-applied challenge, the court

  would find the statute is vague as applied to [Defendant’s] conduct because the statute

  does not provide adequately clear notice to an ordinary person that possessing a gun five

  weeks after using drugs is prohibited conduct.” Morales-Lopez, 2022 WL 2355920, at

  *12. According to the district court, the Government presented no evidence at trial that

  Defendant “actually used drugs at any point in the five weeks leading up to his arrest.”

  Id. The entirety of the trial evidence and reasonable inferences to be drawn therefrom,

  properly considered in view of the governing law, however, tell a different tale.

         “When the validity of a[] [statute] is drawn in question, and even if a serious doubt

  of constitutionality is raised, it is a cardinal principle that [courts] will first ascertain

  whether a construction of the statute is fairly possible by which the question may be

  avoided.” Crowell v. Benson, 285 U.S. 22, 62 (1932). To narrow the meaning of “user”

  and eliminate the risk that § 922(g)(3) could be vague in its application, federal appeals

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  courts, consistent with our view in Reed that the statute was susceptible to a narrowing

  construction, 114 F.3d at 1071, have interpreted § 922(g)(3) so a defendant may be

  convicted thereunder only if the Government “introduced sufficient evidence of a

  temporal nexus between the drug use and firearm possession.” United States v. Edwards,

  540 F.3d 1156, 1163 (10th Cir. 2008); see also United States v. Carnes, 22 F.4th 743,

  747–49 (8th Cir. 2022); United States v. Cook, 970 F.3d 866, 878–80 (7th Cir. 2020). In

  United States v. Bennett, 329 F.3d 769, 778 (10th Cir. 2003), we held that the defendant’s

  “regular and ongoing use of . . . methamphetamine during the same time as his firearm

  possession qualified him as an ‘unlawful user of a controlled substance.’” (internal

  brackets and ellipses omitted). Defendant does not suggest the district court improperly

  instructed the jury by telling it that to convict him under § 922(g)(3), it had to find his use

  of controlled substances “regular and ongoing” at the time he possessed the stolen

  firearm. So the question becomes just this: Where “use” is defined as “regular and

  ongoing,” whether a person of ordinary intelligence would understand that Defendant’s

  conduct could constitute a violation of § 922(g)(3).

         We begin by considering Defendant’s post-arrest interview with Officer Atkin.

  This interview revealed that Defendant, based both on how he described procuring and

  using methamphetamine, was a serious drug user four or five weeks before he and

  Amaya attempted to rob the Sportman’s Warehouse on January 10. Defendant admitted

  buying drugs from Jesus as well as other individuals he ran into in the neighborhood in

  December 2019: “[T]here were always people that I knew that would see me . . . , and

  they would ask me, ‘Hey, you want some?’ I would say, ‘Yes.’” (emphasis added). The

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  fact that people “always” solicited Defendant to buy drugs and he accepted their

  solicitations certainly suggest that Defendant’s drug use was regular and ongoing in

  December 2019. That Defendant did not know the owner of the house where he went to

  ingest methamphetamine around the relevant time only bolsters our conclusion.

  Defendant admitted his memory was unclear because he had been using drugs and had

  not slept for a number of days.

         Now let us move forward one month to January 2020 and consider the evidence of

  Defendant’s drug use uncovered on the day of his arrest—evidence the district court

  apparently overlooked. Amaya and Defendant drove to the Sportsman’s Warehouse in

  the former’s Nissan Altima. Inside the vehicle, investigators located over 22 grams of

  methamphetamine and a lighter in the driver’s door panel.            In the center console,

  investigators recovered a pipe with methamphetamine residue. Make of this evidence in

  isolation what you will because from this point forward things only get worse for

  Defendant. The elephant in the room is the 5.7 grams of methamphetamine uncovered in

  the backseat of Officer Wathen’s patrol car directly behind where Defendant had been

  sitting after he was placed in custody. Even the district court recognized that Defendant

  possessed the methamphetamine before unloading it in the backseat of Officer Wathen’s

  squad car. Morales-Lopez, 2022 WL 2355920, at *12 (“[T]he same day he was arrested

  at Sportsman’s Warehouse, [Defendant] possessed methamphetamine.”). And what was

  Defendant’s reason for possessing the methamphetamine? Based on his training and

  experience, Detective Davis testified that the amount of methamphetamine Defendant

  possessed at the time of his arrest was for personal use.

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         Considering the foregoing evidence in its entirety, Defendant’s December 2019

  drug use appears to have been still regular and ongoing as of January 10, 2020, when he

  was arrested. The district court opined that the Government presented no evidence

  Defendant “actually used drugs at any point in the five weeks leading up to his arrest.”

  Id. But the court’s apparent insistence on direct evidence is mistaken. We simply cannot

  ignore the reasonable inferences to be drawn from the circumstantial evidence

  presented—inferences that could well lead a reasonable person to conclude Defendant’s

  drug use was regular and ongoing at the time he possessed a stolen firearm. Our words in

  Edwards, 540 F.3d at 1162, fit perfectly: “While . . . the Government did not introduce

  specific, direct evidence pinpointing precise dates on which Defendant used drugs, the

  evidence introduced at trial supported a reasonable inference that Defendant was a user of

  controlled substances during all relevant times.” See also Bennett, 329 F.3d at 776 (“[A]

  court may use evidence of a defendant’s unlawful use of drugs while on bond to infer he

  was a user at the time he possessed a firearm.”).

         If Defendant’s regular and ongoing use of methamphetamine in December 2019

  was no longer regular and ongoing at the time of his arrest, why did he arrive to rob a gun

  store in a vehicle with a man he had used drugs with just the previous month and that

  contained not only methamphetamine and a lighter, but, sitting in the center console in

  plain view, a pipe with methamphetamine residue? And most importantly of all, what

  was Defendant doing with a user amount of methamphetamine on his person at the time

  of his arrest? People do not carry methamphetamine on their persons absent an intention

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  to use or distribute, or both. The uncontested evidence in this case was that the amount

  Defendant possessed was intended for personal use.

         The dispositive point of all this is that § 922(g)(3)’s phrase “unlawful user of . . .

  any controlled substance” is clear in its application to Defendant’s conduct. The facts

  presented at trial, coupled with reasonable inferences drawn from those facts, could

  support the conclusion that Defendant was an “unlawful user” of methamphetamine, one

  whose use was “regular and ongoing,” while in possession of a stolen firearm on January

  10. Because the Government introduced sufficient evidence of the requisite temporal

  nexus between Defendant’s drug use and firearm possession, Defendant’s as applied

  challenge must fail.

                                             ***

         Accordingly, the judgment of the district court dismissing the § 922(g)(3) charge

  against Defendant as violative of the Fifth Amendment’s Due Process Clause is

  REVERSED. This matter is REMANDED to the district court with instructions to

  reinstate the jury’s verdict and proceed accordingly.

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