Episode 3417
United States v. Moore (1973)
Sat, 2026-Sep-12 00:00 UTC
Length - 3:18
Direct Link
Welcome to featured Wiki of the Day, your daily dose of knowledge from Wikipedia's finest articles.
The featured article for Saturday, 12 September 2026, is United States v. Moore (1973).
United States v. Moore, 486 F.2d 1139 (D. C. Cir. 1973), was a case heard by the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in which the court ruled that narcotics addicts are not protected from prosecution for narcotics possession. Police officers investigating a drug trafficking ring found the defendant, Raymond Moore, in a hotel room with heroin capsules in his pocket; he was charged with narcotics possession. Moore claimed at trial and on appeal that his addiction to heroin forced him to possess and use drugs. He argued that because he did not have the free will to keep himself from possessing drugs, he should not be held criminally responsible. At trial, he was convicted and sentenced to six years in prison.
Moore's proposed addiction defense on appeal to the D. C. Circuit was based on three legal foundations. First, he argued that laws criminalizing possession of narcotics were not intended to apply to narcotics addicts. Second, he argued that narcotics addicts are protected by the common law principle of mens rea (meaning a "guilty mind"), which generally requires the government to prove that a person had the free will to commit a crime before they can be found guilty of it. Third, he argued that punishing a narcotics addict for possession would be cruel and unusual punishment in violation of the Eighth Amendment, citing a previous U. S. Supreme Court ruling. The government responded that the law was not intended to create an addiction defense, and that the Supreme Court ruling did not apply to this case.
The D. C. Circuit upheld Moore's conviction in a 5–4 vote, refusing to create the addiction defense. The five judges, split across two separate opinions, doubted that addicts physically cannot keep themselves from taking drugs; they also worried that the defense could potentially apply to crimes more serious than possession, or lead people to fake addiction. The dissent supported Moore's legal arguments and argued even further that the justice system accomplishes nothing by imprisoning an addict for possession. The court remanded Moore's case to the lower court for reconsideration of his sentence. Other courts have widely adopted Moore's holding, while legal commentators split sharply; some scholars defended the court's rejection of the addiction defense as legally sound and a necessary deterrent, while others attacked it as unsupported by the law and the medical evidence.
This recording reflects the Wikipedia text as of 00:00 UTC on Saturday, 12 September 2026.
For the full current version of the article, see United States v. Moore (1973) on Wikipedia.
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Until next time, I'm generative Joanna.
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