United States v. Bryant Turner

• Court: Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit
• Decided: December 6, 2024
• Docket: 24-5175
• Status: Unpublished

Opinion

NOT RECOMMENDED FOR PUBLICATION File Name: 24a0503n.06

No. 24-5175

UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS FILED FOR THE SIXTH CIRCUIT Dec 06, 2024 KELLY L. STEPHENS, Clerk ) UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, ) Plaintiff-Appellee, ) ON APPEAL FROM THE ) UNITED STATES DISTRICT v. ) COURT FOR THE WESTERN ) DISTRICT OF TENNESSEE BRYANT TURNER, ) Defendant-Appellant. ) OPINION )

BEFORE: GRIFFIN, STRANCH, and MATHIS, Circuit Judges.

GRIFFIN, Circuit Judge.

In 2013, defendant Bryant Turner retaliated against his girlfriend for alleged infidelity by

recruiting six friends to assault her in their communal home. They held her down and took turns

punching and kicking her; Turner himself struck her multiple times. The badly beaten woman

called the police, and Turner ultimately pleaded guilty to domestic assault causing bodily harm, a

misdemeanor in the state of Tennessee. See Tenn. Code Ann. §§ 39-13-101(a)(1), (b)(1)(A), 39-

13-111(b).

Eight years later, law enforcement officers pulled over a vehicle, driven by Turner, for

speeding. Turner admitted that he had a handgun in the center console and consented to a search

of the vehicle. Police recovered the handgun and ammunition.

Turner’s previous misdemeanor domestic-violence conviction prevents him from lawfully

possessing firearms and ammunition, so a federal grand jury indicted him for violating 18 U.S.C.

§ 922(g)(9). He moved to dismiss the indictment, arguing that § 922(g)(9) facially violates the No. 24-5175, United States v. Turner

Second Amendment in light of New York State Rifle & Pistol Ass’n v. Bruen, 597 U.S. 1 (2022).

The district court denied the motion, and Turner pleaded guilty to the indictment.

On appeal, Turner raises both facial and as-applied challenges to § 922(g)(9). Given our

intervening precedent and Turner’s violent predicate conviction, both arguments must fail. See

United States v. Gailes, 118 F.4th 822, 830 (6th Cir. 2024).

In Gailes, we held that § 922(g)(9) does not violate the Second Amendment on its face. Id.

at 826–28. Thus, Turner’s facial challenge is without merit.

His as-applied challenge fares no better. At the outset, Turner’s failure to raise this

argument in district court renders it forfeited and results in plain-error review. See Davis v. United

States, 589 U.S. 345, 346 (2020) (per curiam). Turner disagrees that he forfeited his as-applied

argument because he “argued that he was a law-abiding citizen” in his reply to the motion to

dismiss, so he contends he raised his as-applied challenge “by implication.” But preserving an

issue for appeal requires more than raising a bare-bones argument in a reply brief. See United

States v. Huntington Nat’l Bank, 574 F.3d 329, 332 (6th Cir. 2009) (“To preserve [an]

argument . . . the litigant not only must identify the issue but also must provide some minimal level

of argumentation in support of it.”); United States v. Hendrickson, 822 F.3d 812, 829 n.10 (6th

Cir. 2016) (“A party may not raise an issue on appeal by mentioning it in the most skeletal way,

leaving the court to put flesh on its bones.” (internal quotation marks and alterations omitted)); see

also United States v. Stevens, 559 U.S. 460, 473 n.3 (2010) (stating that an as-applied constitutional

claim was not preserved when only a “general” constitutional claim was raised in the lower courts).

The plain-error standard requires that a defendant show a clear or obvious error that affects his

substantial rights and the “fairness, integrity[,] or public reputation of judicial proceedings.”

United States v. Mize, 814 F.3d 401, 408 (6th Cir. 2016) (citation omitted). To do so, Turner must

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identify a case in our court or the Supreme Court evidencing the error. See, e.g., United States v.

Al-Maliki, 787 F.3d 784, 794 (6th Cir. 2015).

Turner cannot overcome this rigorous standard. He argues that he is a “non-violent

misdemeanant[]” and that certain predicate convictions for § 922(g)(9) do not necessarily cause

bodily injury to another person. But the record belies the assertion that Turner is non-violent—he

coordinated a ruthless group beating of his girlfriend. And it is irrelevant whether certain state-

law domestic-violence misdemeanors include as an element bodily injury to another because

Turner’s crime—domestic assault causing bodily injury—plainly includes such conduct. Turner

“fall[s] squarely within the category of people who pose a clear threat to the physical safety of

others” and therefore may be disarmed without offending the Second Amendment. See Gailes,

118 F.4th at 830. The district court here did not plainly err.

For these reasons, we affirm the district court’s judgment.

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