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Mark Jerome Johnson Blount v. United States, et al.

Paid petition · United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit, No. 23-3245 · judgment December 4, 2023


Certiorari denied · April 1, 2024
Pre-decision estimate: 0% cert probability

Before the decision, well below the 4.1% base rate, with no standout signals pointing toward a grant.

Question presented

Does Petitioner, in a pre-enforcement action brought under the Declaratory Judgment Act, have to allege that he has already violated the law or “will in fact violate the law,” or plead his intentions with such exacting specificity as to impose criminal penalties upon him under the challenged law, in order to have standing to challenge a purported law which unlawfully infringes his absolute ancestral and constitutional rights to keep and bear arms by absolutely “proscrib[ing]”conduct directly “affected with [those rights],”1 to wit, absolutely prohibiting Petitioner from keeping ordinary military weapons manufactured post-1986, when he clearly avers in his pleadings that he presently intends to act in accordance with his absolute rights by keeping the proscribed weapons in the immediate future, in contravention to said law, but that he has been deterred from doing so by said provisions, the regularity and history of their enforcement, the severity of the unlawful penalties imposed for violations of said provisions, and the governmental defendants’ failure to disavow enforcement of the presently-challenged provisions against Petitioner when he so acts, and, accordingly, coerced by said provisions and the defendants to “forgo the full exercise of his rights” due to his reasonable fear of enforcement of these Acts against him? Susan B. Anthony List v. Driehaus, 573 U.S. 149, 161-3 (2014).

Counsel of record

For petitioner
Mark Jerome Johnson Blount

For respondent
Elizabeth B. Prelogar
Solicitor General

Case

Conference history
Distributed for 1 conference

Proceedings

  1. Apr 01 2024
    Petition DENIED.
  2. Mar 12 2024
    DISTRIBUTED for Conference of 3/28/2024.
  3. Mar 08 2024
    Waiver of right of respondent United States, et al. to respond filed.
  4. Feb 09 2024
    Petition for a writ of certiorari filed. (Response due March 27, 2024)