Under the United States Constitution, no one should be deprived of their rights without due process of law. The problem is that what some consider due process is so broad that literally anything a judge says is enough for them.
And those accused of crimes, but with no convictions, are often barred from exercising all of their rights.
Some of those make sense, like not leaving the country or even the state, in some cases. For many, the prohibition on buying or owning guns, particularly in cases such as those that involve stalking, makes just as much sense.
However, a Texas court seems to disagree, at least somewhat.
An Austin appeals court must reconsider whether a man accused of stalking and threatening his ex-girlfriend can be banned from owning a gun for life, the Texas Supreme Court ruled Friday.
Justices signaled support for Jonathan Noyes’ argument that, according to the 2024 U.S. Supreme Court ruling in a North Texas domestic violence case U.S. v. Rahimi, lower courts improperly prohibited him from owning a gun for the rest of his ex-girlfriend’s Samantha Voges’ life.
But justices stopped short of issuing a decision that lets him own a gun. The court left the ultimate decision up to the Austin-based Third Court of Appeals, which previously upheld the gun ban against the alleged stalker.
“The Texas Constitution probably confers an absolute right to keep and bear arms, with the limited exception that the Legislature can regulate the wearing of arms to prevent crime,” Justice James Sullivan wrote in a 47-page concurring opinion. “So the protective order here, with its blanket ban on firearm possession at any time in Voges’s life, is hard to square with our Arms Clause.”
The appeals court’s ruling could eventually be appealed to the Texas Supreme Court. Noyes will still be forbidden from owning a gun while the case is ongoing.
Stalking is a serious subject, and stalkers have been known to turn violent far too often for anyone’s comfort, but not everyone who crosses the line into stalker behavior is an actual threat.
It’s creepy, and I get people being alarmed by it, but there’s a difference between being scared and actually being threatened, and one question is whether Noyes crossed that line, and the initial judge didn’t seem to think so.
A Comal County judge did not find that Noyes posed a credible threat to Voges’ or others’ physical safety, nor that he engaged in family violence or used or threatened to use a weapon. But the court found that there were “reasonable grounds” that Noyes had been stalking Voges.
The judge issued a protective order in 2021 banning Noyes from talking to, harassing or coming near Voges and her parents, and from owning a gun for both of their lifetimes.
The first part of the order makes perfect sense, but since Texas has its own version of the Second Amendment, Noyes argued that the judge went too far with the protective order.
And, if there’s no cause to see him as a threat to anyone’s physical safety, he has a point.
While Rahimi did find that people who are a danger can be disarmed via a protective order, that’s not what the finding on Noyes actually is, so while the court didn’t throw out that part of the protective order, it did direct the judge to reconsider.
It remains to be seen how that will shake out, of course, as the judge might somehow find a way to decide Noyes is a danger to Voges or others, or he might rescind that part of his previous order. For now, though, it’s enough to acknowledge that accusations of stalking, absent any actual threat of violence, shouldn’t be treated the same as a violent maniac vowing to murder someone they’re stalking.
National Headline