Supreme Court Tackles Definition of Domestic Violence

The Supreme Court
weighed in Wednesday on a federal law prohibiting those
convicted of domestic violence from owning guns. Though the court
refused to consider a challenge on Second Amendment grounds, it did
take on clarifying the definition of “domestic violence,” with a
majority of the justices agreeing that it can include “seemingly
minor acts” that may not be characterized as “violent” in a
nondomestic context. Justice Antonin Scalia objected, accusing his
fellow justices of distorting the law and “impoverish[ing] the
language.”

The case, United States v. Castleman, involved
Tennessee resident James A. Castleman, who was convicted of
assaulting the mother of his child in 2001. Afterward, Castleman
argued that the federal gun prohibition didn’t apply to him because
it defines a misdemeanor crime of domestic violence as one
involving “physical force” and his conviction had merely been for
“intentionally or knowing causing bodily injury.” Yep. 

A federal trial judge and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the
Sixth Circuit agreed with him, but the U.S. Supreme Court
unanimously reversed
those decisions.

Writing for six justices, Justice Sonia Sotomayor noted that the
Department of Justice’s Office on Violence Against Women defines domestic
violence to include “hitting, slapping, shoving, grabbing,
pinching, biting, and hair pulling” and that acts of this nature
are “easy to describe as ‘domestic violence’ when the accumulation
of such acts over time can subject one intimate partner” to the
other partner’s control.

“If a seemingly minor act like this draws the attention of
authorities and leads to a successful prosecution for a misdemeanor
offense, it does not offend common sense or the English language to
characterize the resulting conviction as a misdemeanor crime of
‘domestic violence.'” 

In a concurrence, Justice Scalia agreed that Castleman’s crime
amounted to domestic violence. But he objected to his benchmates’
definition of domestic violence, calling it unfortunate that they’d
interpret “any offensive touching, no matter how slight, as
sufficient” to count as domestic violence.

“That absurdity is not only at war with the English language, it
is flatly inconsistent” with legal defintions of domestic violence,
Scalia wrote. He went on to say that the DOJ is entitled to adopt
anty definition of domestic violence it wants, but

when they (and the Court) imporse their all-embracing definition
on the rest of us, they not only distort the law, they impoverish
the language. When everything is domestic violence, nothing is.
Congress will have to come up with a new word (I cannot imagine
what it would be) to denote actual domestic violence.

Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., joined by Justice Clarence Thomas,
issued a separate concurrence.