The Supreme Court passed up a chance Monday to correct a ruling by Hawaii’s top court that rejected its Second Amendment jurisprudence.
In a February ruling, the Hawaii Supreme Court openly rejected landmark Second Amendment cases, finding the “spirit of Aloha clashes with a federally-mandated lifestyle that lets citizens walk around with deadly weapons during day-to-day activities.”
“In Hawaiʻi, there is no state constitutional right to carry a firearm in public,” the state court held.
Justice Clarence Thomas explained in a statement joined by Justice Samuel Alito that correction of the court’s error “must await another day.”
Though Thomas and Alito, along with Justice Neil Gorsuch, knocked the Hawaii court for its decision, the justices explained they could not accept the case at this point because the defendant, Christopher Wilson, has not yet gone to trial on other charges. Wilson was arrested in 2017 for trespassing on private property while carrying a pistol without a license.
“Wilson moved to dismiss only some of his charges, most notably leaving for trial a trespassing charge on which his Second Amendment defense has no bearing,” Thomas wrote in a statement joined by Justice Samuel Alito. “He thus seeks review of an interlocutory order over which we may not have jurisdiction.”
Still, Thomas noted Hawaii’s top court would have found the state’s licensing rules “unconstitutional and upheld the dismissal of Wilson’s public-carry charges” if it had followed the Supreme Court’s Second Amendment jurisprudence.
“I agree with the Court’s decision to deny certiorari in this posture,” he wrote. “In an appropriate case, however, we should make clear that Americans are always free to invoke the Second Amendment as a defense against unconstitutional firearms-licensing schemes.”
In a separate statement, Justice Neil Gorsuch also left the door open to considering the issue in the future if Hawaii’s top court did not change course later in the proceedings.
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