Background
Rebecca Sue Orange was convicted in 2021 of felony forgery under Virginia law. In May 2024, a sheriff’s deputy responding to a domestic-disturbance call at Orange’s home found her intoxicated on the front deck with a 12-gauge shotgun leaning against the wall behind her. Orange’s fiancée also showed the deputy a video of Orange carrying the shotgun into the house.
Orange was indicted for possessing a firearm after conviction of a nonviolent felony. She moved to dismiss, arguing that Virginia’s felon-in-possession statute was unconstitutional as applied to a person convicted of a nonviolent felony. After the circuit court denied the motion, Orange entered a conditional guilty plea that preserved the Second Amendment issue for appeal. She received a five-year sentence suspended after one year, subject to good behavior and supervised probation, and the sentence was stayed pending appeal.
The Court’s Holding
The Court of Appeals held that the Second Amendment does not prevent Virginia from disarming a person convicted of forgery. The Commonwealth did not dispute that the Amendment’s text covered Orange’s possession of an ordinary shotgun in her home, so the case turned on whether the restriction was consistent with the Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.
The court concluded that it was. When the Second Amendment was ratified in 1791, forgery was punishable in most American jurisdictions by death and forfeiture of all property. The court reasoned that disarmament was a lesser-included consequence of those historically accepted punishments and was consistent with a tradition of disarming people whose severe violations of established legal norms rendered them untrustworthy to possess firearms.
The court deliberately declined to decide whether the Second Amendment permits States to disarm everyone convicted of any nonviolent felony. It resolved only the narrower as-applied question involving Orange’s forgery conviction and affirmed her conviction on that basis.
Key Takeaways
- Virginia may constitutionally prohibit a person convicted of forgery from possessing a firearm, including an ordinary firearm kept in the home.
- The court relied on Founding-era punishments for forgery and the historical tradition of disarming people deemed untrustworthy after severe violations of legal norms.
- The decision does not establish that every nonviolent felony supports permanent disarmament; that broader question remains unresolved.
Why It Matters
The decision applies the Supreme Court’s historical-tradition framework on an offense-specific basis rather than adopting a categorical rule for all felons or all nonviolent felons. It shows that a modern felon-in-possession prosecution may survive an as-applied Second Amendment challenge when the government can connect the predicate offense to severe, widely accepted Founding-era punishments and principles.
At the same time, the court’s narrow reasoning leaves room for future challenges involving nonviolent felonies with materially different histories. The constitutional status of Virginia’s firearm prohibition as applied to those offenses remains open.