Key Takeaways
- The Third Circuit ruled the federal felon-in-possession statute unconstitutional for Edward A. Williams, who had DUI convictions.
- The court emphasized the Second Amendment’s significance and questioned the long-standing nature of the felon ban.
- Williams unknowingly owned firearms until 2015, when he learned he was prohibited due to past DUI convictions.
- The court distinguished Williams’s non-violent DUIs from laws that aimed to prevent armed violence and rejected the government’s 925(c) restoration process argument.
- This ruling does not remove the felon ban universally, but it highlights flaws in applying it to non-violent offenders like Williams.
Estimated reading time: 5 minutes
PHILADELPHIA, PA — The en banc Third Circuit ruled on October 13, 2026, that the federal felon-in-possession statute, 18 U.S.C. § 922(g)(1), is unconstitutional as applied to Edward A. Williams, a Pennsylvania man whose only predicate offenses were two convictions for driving under the influence in the early 2000s. The court affirmed a declaratory judgment from Judge John M. Younge of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania. A declaratory judgment is a court order stating what the law is as to a specific person, in this case that the ban cannot be enforced against him.
The opinion opens in the court’s own voice, calling the Second Amendment “a primary protection against tyranny, a strong bulwark securing American liberty, and an indispensable means of defending the public good,” and saying courts testing restrictions on these “most sacred” and “necessary” rights must weigh the history and tradition of firearm regulations “with care and rigor.” That is the framework the Supreme Court set in Bruen, stated here as the court’s own premise.
Then come the facts, and they are the heart of this case. Pennsylvania grades DUI by blood alcohol concentration, and the statute gives each tier a name: “general impairment” runs from 0.08 to just under 0.10 percent, “high rate of alcohol” from 0.10 to just under 0.16, and “highest rate of alcohol” at 0.16 or above. In 2000, Williams was charged with driving with a BAC above 0.10 percent, the middle tier, and entered a Pennsylvania diversion program. In 2004 he was arrested again, and in 2005 he was convicted of driving with a BAC of 0.16 percent or higher, the top tier. Because it was a second offense, that conviction was punishable by up to five years in prison. He was sentenced to between ninety days and two years and served it in home confinement. The court notes that the second conviction, in its words, “unbeknownst to him” triggered § 922(g)(1), which bars anyone convicted of a crime punishable by more than a year in prison from possessing a firearm.
That “unbeknownst to him” is the detail I keep coming back to. Williams went on owning firearms, worked at a gun store where the ATF background-checked and cleared him, and bought a new gun, answering “no” when the Pennsylvania sale form asked whether he had ever been convicted of a crime punishable by more than a year. It was not until 2015, when his own attorney told him, that he learned he was a prohibited person. He then divested every firearm he owned and stopped buying or possessing guns. When he later applied for a Pennsylvania License to Carry, the FBI’s background check flagged the 2005 DUI and he was denied.
On the law, the court held that permanently disarming all felons is not a long-standing American practice. It dates the felon ban to the Federal Firearms Act of 1938, which reached only people convicted of a “crime of violence,” and a 1961 amendment that abandoned the focus on violence for a technical bar keyed to any crime punishable by more than a year. From there the court worked through the elements of Williams’s DUI offense, found it contains no threatening or violent element, and rejected the government’s historical analogy to old “habitual drunkard” laws, which it said were aimed at protecting drunkards and their families rather than at preventing armed violence. The record showed Williams had done nothing violent in over twenty years, held the same job for three decades, and posed no present danger.
The government’s fallback was the administrative restoration process under 18 U.S.C. § 925(c), which it argued turns a permanent ban into a temporary one. That process sat dormant for roughly three decades after Congress defunded it in 1992, and the Attorney General only revived it in 2025, granting relief to a trickle of applicants by invitation. The court was unmoved: “Our duty is to decide the case based on present facts, not future promises.” It closed on redemption, writing that with rehabilitation “comes restoration of the civic privileges guaranteed to citizens by the Constitution, and the freedom to again exercise the natural right of armed defense against threats and tyranny.”
Two pieces of legal language matter here. First, the ruling is “as applied,” meaning the court held the statute cannot be enforced against Williams on his facts; it did not strike § 922(g)(1) for everyone. Second, the court sat en banc, the full bench rather than a three-judge panel. Judge Matey wrote the opinion of the court, joined by Judges Hardiman, Bibas, Porter, Phipps, Bove, and Mascott. Chief Judge Chagares concurred in the judgment but would require future claimants to run the § 925(c) process first, excusing Williams only because of the nine years his case had already spent in court. The affirmance was not unanimous. Judge Shwartz, joined by Judges Krause and Restrepo, dissented, arguing a recidivist DUI is a dangerous offense that disarms and that Williams should have exhausted § 925(c). Judge Freeman, joined by Judges Montgomery-Reeves and Chung, agreed Williams need not exhaust but dissented from the judgment, arguing the case should go back for factfinding on whether he is dangerous now.
More from USA Carry:
This is a narrow win for one man, not a wipeout of the felon ban. But the shape of it is hard to miss. The government defended a lifetime prohibition on a man with two decades-old DUIs, told the court he should wait on an administrative process the court itself calls rarely received, and lost in front of the full circuit.
I will continue tracking Williams v. Attorney General, including any move by the government to take it to the Supreme Court.
