A federal judge ruled Wednesday that D.C. police officers wrongfully arrested six people for carrying handguns in public between 2012 and 2014, potentially creating a legal pathway for as many as 4,500 people arrested under similar circumstances to seek damages from the city.

The six plaintiffs were arrested for violating a combination of D.C. gun laws that have since been struck down or changed. They sued and asked for several forms of relief — including judgment in their favor, the sealing of their arrest and prosecution records, and the award of damages.

The lead plaintiff in the cases decided on Wednesday is Maggie Smith, a nurse from North Carolina who was pulled over in 2014 and subsequently arrested for carrying a pistol that was licensed in her home state. The other plaintiffs are a combination of D.C., Maryland, and Virginia residents who were arrested on gun charges in the District. All of their charges were eventually dropped — and the laws they were arrested for violating are no longer in effect. They filed the lawsuit jointly in 2015.

D.C. previously enforced a complete ban on carrying handguns in public, which a federal judge ruled unconstitutional in 2014. The city replaced that complete ban with the so-called “good reason” law, which said that residents needed to have a compelling reason to obtain a permit for a firearm — but the “good reason” law was also ruled unconstitutional by an appeals court in 2017. D.C. has also since repealed laws that prevented non-D.C. residents from possessing firearms and criminalized the possession of ammunition by people who didn’t have their guns registered in the District. 

D.C.’s Office of the Attorney General argued in court that the arrests were not wrongfully made because they were enforcing laws that had not yet been struck down. But U.S. District Judge Royce C. Lamberth ruled that D.C. violated the plaintiffs’ Second Amendment rights “by arresting them, detaining them, prosecuting them, and seizing their guns based on an unconstitutional set of D.C. laws.” 

A spokesperson for the attorney general’s office declined to comment on the ruling. William “Chaz” Claiborne, the lead counsel for the plaintiffs, said his clients were “over the moon” about the decision, which “totally vindicates their constitutional right to carry a handgun in the District.” 

D.C. once had some of the country’s strictest gun laws. Local officials have long argued that these laws are necessary because the city has the unique dual challenge of both preventing gun violence and maintaining the heightened security required to protect buildings and people associated with the federal government and many international embassies. 

But as Lamberth wrote in Wednesday’s opinion, “The District of Columbia is no stranger to challenges to its gun laws.” In 2008, a landmark supreme court ruling found that the city’s ban on handguns was unconstitutional. That 5-4 decision allowed D.C. residents to possess handguns at home — and kicked off a wave of other challenges to D.C.’s strict gun laws from gun rights activists that eventually forced D.C. to get rid of other restrictions on guns, including the bans and restrictions on carrying legally registered guns in public. 

George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley wrote in a blog post Thursday that while D.C. could still appeal the decision, the court’s latest opinion “has cleared the way for claims for damages by as many as 4,500 people similarly arrested under the law courts overturned in 2014.” 

Lamberth has not yet ruled on a motion seeking class action status. Claiborne says that the judge’s decision about class certification will determine the number of people who could potentially receive damages from the city and the amount of money the city could potentially be required to pay out in damages. If class-action status is granted, plaintiffs could claim damages as a group. If they are not certified as a class, plaintiffs could potentially file individual lawsuits for damages — but given that thousands of people have been arrested under the since-changed gun law, Claiborne says “absent the class certification, a lot of people will never hear about the decision.” 

The latest challenge to D.C. gun laws came earlier this month, when three gun-owning residents —  including Dick Heller, the lead plaintiff in the landmark 2008 case — filed another lawsuit against D.C. over ghost gun laws. The plaintiffs in that suit claim that D.C.’s prohibition of “ghost guns” and restrictions on the manufacturing of guns from kits are unconstitutional. 

D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser has said that “ghost guns” are particularly problematic because they are difficult to trace and readily available to people who are banned from owning guns —  but critics of D.C.’s ban, which was enacted in 2020, say it’s too broad and has the potential to punish otherwise legal gun owners.