The Hunter Biden indictment, annotated

CNN’s Devan Cole and Tierney Sneed note that the gun possession law Hunter Biden is accused of breaking is already on shaky legal ground after an August ruling by an appeals court covering three southern states that declared the statute unconstitutional.

Last month, a New Orleans-based federal appeals court struck down the decades-old law, saying it violated the Second Amendment in a case concerning a man who was convicted under it in 2022.

“In short, our history and tradition may support some limits on an intoxicated person’s right to carry a weapon, but it does not justify disarming a sober citizen based exclusively on his past drug usage,” Circuit Judge Jerry Smith, a Ronald Reagan appointee, wrote for the three-judge panel. “Nor do more generalized traditions of disarming dangerous persons support this restriction on nonviolent drug users.”

The ruling by the Fifth Circuit, which oversees Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas, means that other defendants convicted under the law in those states could seek to bring new challenges to their convictions. At this time, it has no legal bearing on Hunter Biden’s case, which was brought in Delaware.