Supreme Court justices stated their support of federal legislation that keeps guns out of the hands of convicted domestic violence offenders this week.
The high court unanimously boosted the law on Wednesday, the Washington Post reported, when judges gave a broader interpretation of the need for "physical force" - a necessary distinction, the federal government stated, since certain states don't outline the amount of force required to render a case one of domestic violence.
James Alvin Castleman first brought the issue before the court, after he was accused of buying and selling guns on the black market, the Washington Post reported. Law enforcement officials then hit Castleman with another charge for breaching a federal law concerning possession of arms, after he pleaded guilty to misdemeanor domestic violence in Tennessee.
He reportedly "intentionally or knowingly caused bodily injury" to his child's mother, according to the Washington Post.
The federal law demands the "use or attempted use of physical force," while Tennessee's legislation on misdemeanor domestic cases does not.
The Washington Post reported that a judge sided with Castleman on dismissing the federal charges, as the law calls for "violent contact with the victim," to be considered.
But the opinion by Justice Sonia Sotomayor stated that definition was interpreted word for word.
"Minor uses of force may not constitute 'violence' in the generic sense," Sotomayor wrote in the opinion. Merely holding a person tightly to the point of bruising "is easy to describe as 'domestic violence' when the accumulation of such acts over time can subject one intimate partner to the other's control."
Although all judges agreed with the ruling in the case, Justice Antonin Scalia said a broad definition of domestic violence could "impoverish the language."
"When everything is domestic violence, nothing is," the Washington Post reported Scalia as writing. "Congress will have to come up with a new word (I cannot imagine what it would be) to denote actual domestic violence."
