It started with an absolutely bizarre case where a six-year-old student shot his teacher. The school administrator dropped the ball and is still facing repercussions, and the student’s mom went to prison. It wasn’t so much because the kid had taken her gun, but that she use marijuana, which is a no-no.
Or, more accurately, was a no-no. The Hemani decision came down and ruled that using marijuana recreationally was not sufficient cause for a lifetime ban from gun ownership.
But the mother in that case, Deja Taylor, went to prison not so much because of what he child did, but because she lied about her drug use on her Form 4473. Which means the Hermani decision may well impact her case.
Norfolk attorney Eric Korslund, who did not work on Taylor’s case, said it remains unclear how broadly courts will apply the Supreme Court’s decision.
“It’s tough to say, to be honest with you, and I don’t know how it will apply to cases in the past. The law doesn’t apply retroactively,” Korslund said.
Korslund said the Supreme Court’s reasoning focused on whether a person posed a danger while possessing a firearm, rather than solely on past marijuana use.
“Just because someone may have used drugs in the past doesn’t mean they were high when handling a firearm,” Korslund said.
He said attorneys in the future may use the ruling to challenge similar prosecutions.
“If the Hemani case applies, they can cite that as what we call precedent,” Korslund said.
Still, Korslund said Taylor faces a significant obstacle because she accepted a plea agreement rather than taking her case to trial.
“Because she pled guilty, she likely waived all of her appeals rights, and so she’s not able to appeal her case or use this to her advantage, in my opinion,” Korslund said.
Appeals following guilty pleas are rare and generally limited to specific legal issues, he said.
“It’s very, very limited times you can appeal a guilty plea,” Korslund said.
Korslund also said he does not believe Taylor would be eligible to have her conviction expunged.
The problem with this reasoning–and I’m not saying Korslund is wrong here, as I’m not an attorney–is that Taylor had every reason to accept a plea deal because she was undoubtedly guilty of the crime as the law was enforced. She was going to go to prison either way, so the incentive to take a deal likely meant less time overall for her.
Considering that we have a new understanding of the law thanks to a unanimous Supreme Court decision, which I never thought I’d see in a gun case, she should be eligible to have her case re-examined, at least.
A lot of prosecutors don’t want to take cases to court because juries are funny things. They push for plea agreements so they can avoid the hassle, and they pronounce doom and gloom on the individuals facing criminal charges, dropping the worst-case scenarios as if they’re the most likely ones or otherwise simply making it look like they’re doing the defendant a favor.
And considering how people understood the law in question before Hermani, even her defense attorneys would have encouraged her to take it under the circumstances.
Now, had she gotten charged with some kind of negligence for allowing her six-year-old kid to access her firearm, there would be nothing to talk about. Those weren’t the charges, though, and so I can’t help but believe that an actual justice system would step in and address these charges in light of the Supreme Court’s decision.
Unfortunately, this is the same system that locked Tate Adamiak up for a couple of decades over non-machine guns, so what else do I expect?
Editor’s Note: The radical Left will stop at nothing to enact their radical gun control agenda and strip us of our Second Amendment rights.
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