Criminal Justice / Firearms Regulation
A decade-old felony still blocks gun ownership
Peter Villa Cordova had finished probation seven years before he was found with a firearm. The Fifth Circuit affirmed his conviction anyway, and Judge Ho said the law can treat old and new felonies the same.
The Fifth Circuit kept Peter Villa Cordova’s felon-in-possession conviction in place. Judge Ho’s concurrence said the federal gun ban has no expiration date, which means people can remain barred long after serving their sentences.
- Judge Ho said the federal gun ban has no expiration date.
- Cordova’s prior felony was about a decade old.
- He had already finished probation seven years before the gun case.
- The conviction stands, but the opinion flags a constitutional issue.
- A decade-old felony can still keep someone from owning a gun under federal law, and a Fifth Circuit judge said that reach may be hard to square with the Constitution
A decade-old felony can still keep someone from owning a gun under federal law, and a Fifth Circuit judge said that reach may be hard to square with the Constitution. In Peter Villa Cordova’s case, Judge James C. Ho used a routine felon-in-possession appeal to underline how 18 U.S.C. § 922(g)(1) can operate as a lifetime ban.
Cordova had pleaded guilty to possessing a firearm after a felony conviction. His earlier offenses included drug possession and evading arrest or detention with a motor vehicle, and Ho pointed out that one of those convictions was about a decade old. Cordova served no prison time and had finished probation seven years before the gun charge, yet the federal ban still applied.
No expiration date
Ho’s central point was simple: the statute has no time limit. By its terms, § 922(g)(1) reaches anyone convicted of a felony punishable by more than one year, and it does so even if the person never spent a day in prison. That means an old conviction and a recent one can trigger the same firearms ban.
For people who finished their sentences years ago, that is the part of the law that can feel permanent. The case shows how the ban can keep following someone long after the underlying offense has faded into the past.
The constitutional pressure point
Ho said those facts could present serious constitutional questions depending on the circumstances. His concern was not about Cordova’s guilt in this appeal so much as the statute’s breadth, which treats old felony records and fresh ones alike.
That is where the opinion matters beyond this one defendant. The judge suggested the law’s lifetime reach may invite closer scrutiny when the past conviction is remote and the punishment at the time was light. But he also made clear that this case did not squarely tee up that broader challenge.
What the court did not decide
Cordova did not win on the constitutional issue, and nothing in the opinion changes his conviction. The panel left the felon-in-possession judgment in place while Ho’s concurrence flagged a harder question for another day: how far a firearm ban can go when the felony is long over and the sentence has already been served.
For now, the law stays where it was. The warning is in the reach of the statute, not in any immediate shift for Cordova himself.