A judge on Tuesday rejected Santa Clara County Sheriff Laurie Smith’s late-stage attempt to quash her corruption trial by invoking a recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling on concealed-gun permits — paving the path for the trial to get underway.

On the eve of Smith’s civil trial — which begins with jury selection Wednesday — San Mateo County Superior Court Judge Nancy Fineman denied a request from Smith’s attorney to dismiss six of the seven accusations filed by a Santa Clara County Civil Grand Jury last December.

Allen Ruby, Smith’s attorney, had argued in filings and in court Tuesday that Smith cannot be prosecuted for favoritism in the awarding of concealed-carry weapons licenses because the Supreme Court’s landmark Bruen decision in June struck down the legal framework under which those licenses were granted.

It was an ambitious legal move — and an untested one, given how recently the Supreme Court made its ruling. Fineman acknowledged as much, saying she’d been tasked with “making that first analysis as to how Bruen applies” at the trial-court level.

The Bruen ruling invalidated the “good cause” requirement to obtain a CCW license in place in New York, California and a handful of other states. As a result, argued Ruby, it is no longer possible to accuse Smith of corruption over the way she implemented good cause — which prosecutors say included favoring donors and political supporters for gun permits, failing to investigate other applicants’ good cause statements, and flouting mandatory response deadlines for permit applications.

In essence, Ruby argued, the trial proceeding would be enforcing a now-unconstitutional law.

“The courts cannot enforce (a law) especially after it’s determined that a statute is unconstitutional in part or in whole,” Ruby said Tuesday. “The court has no jurisdiction.”

San Francisco Assistant District Attorney Gabriel Markoff, who is prosecuting Smith, said that the abuse of discretion alleged against her was illegal before and after the Bruen ruling. He argued that the Supreme Court decision did not provide a “constitutional shield” for alleged misconduct like that of Smith’s but instead denounced it.

“It would be using a Supreme Court case that expressly condemns the arbitrary conduct the sheriff is accused of engaging in and using it as her defense,” Markoff said of Ruby’s Bruen argument.

Fineman largely sided with Markoff, though she did dismiss one corruption count in part because it specifically referenced the “good cause” section of California’s CCW statute, nullified by Bruen. That count had accused Smith of “failing to make an investigation and determination of good cause” of CCW applicants from whom she wasn’t trying to curry favor.

“It’s a very interesting issue,” Fineman said after announcing her decision. “It raises a number of issues. I won’t be the last word.”

Smith is now accused of five counts of “willful and corrupt” misconduct in how she and her office issued concealed-carry weapons permits. A county civil grand jury accused her of heavily favoring campaign donors, supporters and high-profile people while ignoring permit applications from ordinary residents. Three of those accusations are based on jury findings that Smith illegally accepted the use of a San Jose Sharks luxury suite from a donor and gun-permit recipient and that she masked her use of the suite to circumvent gift-reporting laws.

Fineman rejected Ruby’s arguments that the luxury-suite counts were tainted by the Bruen ruling because they allege the suite was donated in exchange for the renewal of the donor’s CCW permit.

Smith is also accused of a sixth count of willful misconduct for allegedly withholding information from a county law-enforcement monitor’s probe into the case of former jail inmate Andrew Hogan, who in 2018 severely injured himself in a jail-transport van during a psychiatric emergency and whose family later received a $10 million county settlement. That count was not argued at Tuesday’s hearing.

The upcoming trial will mark the first public testimony given regarding the CCW allegations, which are the subject of two criminal indictments that ensnared Smith’s undersheriff and a captain who was a close adviser, as well as several supporters. Testimony to criminal grand juries in 2020 was given in secret — though transcripts were later released — as was parallel testimony involving several of the same witnesses in front of the civil grand jury last year.

Those expected to testify include Christian West and Martin Nielsen, the former owner and a manager with AS Solution, an executive security firm, who pleaded guilty to misdemeanor bribery-related charges after cooperating with investigators with the district attorney’s office. They have admitted that they paid $45,000 — with the intent to pay $45,000 more — to an independent expenditure committee supporting Smith’s 2018 re-election to procure CCW permits for their security employees.

Smith has not been criminally charged in connection with their cases and refused to testify before a criminal grand jury, invoking the Fifth Amendment.

If Smith, who was elected as California’s first woman sheriff in 1998, is found guilty of any one of the remaining corruption accusations, she will be removed from office. Since she is not running for a seventh term, an expulsion would amount to her departure a few weeks prior to her term ending in January, though she would also be permanently barred from holding public office in the future.

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Jury selection for the trial is set to begin Wednesday, and opening arguments are expected to start Sept. 29. Fineman, whose court took on the case because of conflicts declared by the Santa Clara County Superior Court — whose security is provided by Smith’s office — will preside over the trial, expected to last at least a month.

The trial will take place at the Old Courthouse in downtown San Jose; pretrial hearings to this point had been heard in Fineman’s courtroom in San Mateo County.

Prosecutors with the San Francisco District Attorney’s Office have been shepherding the prosecution because of conflicts involving the Santa Clara County Counsel’s Office — which served as legal advisor to the sheriff’s office — and the county district attorney’s office, which is prosecuting criminal indictments related to the gun permit allegations.