14 years ago in Smith v. US, the Supreme Court ruled that a “criminal who trades his firearm for drugs ‘uses’ it ‘during and in relation to . . . [a] drug trafficking crime’ within the meaning of” the federal firearm sentence enhancement statute.
Today they ruled that a transaction which goes the other way — one in which a person trades his drugs for a gun — does not qualify as ‘using’ a firearm ‘during and in relation to … [a] drug trafficking crime.’
The answer given to the specific question seems a fairly obvious result (the unanimous Court certainly thought so). The case is interesting mainly in that Ginsburg — who concurred in the judgment but did not join Justice Souter’s opinion — was unable to persuade the Court to overrule Smith “and thereby render [the Court’s] precedent both coherent and consistent with normal usage.” Not even Scalia, whose dissent in Smith she cites, joined her in urging the Court to overrule Smith.
Thus, once again, we see the Roberts Court’s tendency toward stare decisis, consensus, and incremental change even if it means fairly narrow rulings without much precedential value outside the facts of the specific case. It would have been a fairly easy (and non-controversial) to overrule Smith here, but they chose not to. This strongly suggests that this Court will be even more circumspect about disturbing other more substantive precedents.
