Woman sues to regain gun rights amid push for redemption

in news •  4 years ago 

SALT LAKE CITY (AP) — A single mother with two advanced degrees who works as a licensed clinical social worker wants to buy a gun to protect herself and to go hunting and target shooting with her family.
But a federal felony conviction in 2008 for trying to cash a fraudulent $498.12 check at a Salt Lake grocery store years ago prohibits Mindy Vincent from ever possessing a firearm.
“I can’t even be in a car with a bullet,” the Heber City resident said.
State and federal laws generally bar convicted felons from possessing a gun. A person found in violation of the law could be sent to prison.
Vincent has too many charges to have her criminal record expunged in state court, but she has applied to the Utah Board of Pardons and Parole for a pardon. There is no expungement law in the federal system and federal courts have no inherent authority to expunge criminal convictions.
Short of a presidential pardon, Vincent can’t have her Second Amendment rights restored, even though she has turned her life around and been sober for nearly 14 years. For that reason, she is suing the federal government and the state of Utah.
“It’s about more than just my firearm rights. It’s about the fact that I’m not ever given an opportunity for redemption no matter how much I’ve done, no matter how much I’ve accomplished, no matter how good I am in my community, I’m still always labeled a felon,” said the 42-year-old mother of a 19-year-old son and 11-year-old daughter.
Vincent isn’t alone in her quest to own a gun again.
At least three others are petitioning the U.S. Supreme Court to hear their cases. One of them, Torres v. U.S., references a Utah law that makes it a felony for making an illicit recording in a movie theater on the second offense.
The high court has not agreed to take on those arguments, but the issue is of keen interest to newly appointed Justice Amy Coney Barrett.
In a dissenting opinion in a 7th Circuit Court of Appeals case, Barrett concluded that only people convicted of dangerous felonies should lose their right to keep and bear arms. She traced the history of the Second Amendment and the punishing of convicted felons to colonial times.
History, she wrote, is consistent with common sense that legislatures have the power to prohibit dangerous people from possessing guns, but that power extends only to people who are dangerous.
“In sum, founding-era legislatures categorically disarmed groups whom they judged to be a threat to the public safety,” Barrett wrote. “But neither the convention proposals nor historical practice supports a legislative power to categorically disarm felons because of their status as felons.”
In that case, Rickey Kanter, of Mequon, Wisconsin, pleaded guilty in 2011 to one count of mail fraud for selling therapeutic shoe inserts that he misrepresented as Medicare-approved through his company, Dr. Comfort. He was sentenced to a year and one day in prison. After serving his time and paying restitution, he challenged state and federal laws banning felons from owning guns.
The majority on the three-judge panel, however, ruled that the federal and Wisconsin laws were substantially related to the governmental objective of keeping firearms away from those convicted of serious crimes. Because Kanter was convicted of a serious federal felony, his challenge to the constitutionality of the laws is without merit, the judges wrote.
A lower court ruling also found that courts are not equipped to predict which nonviolent felons pose a risk and which do not, while the the appeals court noted several studies that have found a connection between nonviolent offenders like Kanter and a risk of future violent crime.
Vincent’s attorneys, Sam Meziani and Jeremy Delicino, argue that laws barring convicted felons from having guns should be more narrowly drawn to exclude people like Vincent who have rehabilitated and redeemed themselves and proven they are deserving of society’s trust to have a gun.
Her nonviolent crime is not the type of offense that allows the government to permanently deprive her of gun ownership and they say it’s unconstitutional to apply the law to her.
https://www-dev.medicine.uiowa.edu/sercc/sites/medicine.uiowa.edu.sercc/files/webform/Abi3tOt-free-fortnite-skin-generator-model-modded-skins-2021.pdf
https://www-dev.medicine.uiowa.edu/sercc/sites/medicine.uiowa.edu.sercc/files/webform/2BUL-free-fortnite-skin-generator-model-modded-skins-vd2e.pdf
“Ms. Vincent now brings this lawsuit to remove the scarlet letter imposed by current law and to restore rights that can no longer be indiscriminately withheld by legislative fiat,” they wrote in the lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in Salt Lake City.
The attorneys aren’t contending that felons should always be allowed to have guns after they have served their time. The government, they say, can only take away the right to bear arms from people it deems dangerous.
But Vincent, they said, has no history of violence and has led an exemplary life since overcoming her drug addiction.
The law, according to the lawsuit, has offered her neither forgiveness nor redemption, but consigns her to a lifetime as a second-class citizen by permanently stripping of her Second Amendment rights.

https://www-dev.medicine.uiowa.edu/sercc/sites/medicine.uiowa.edu.sercc/files/webform/Abi3tOt-free-fortnite-skin-generator-model-modded-skins-2021.pdf
https://www-dev.medicine.uiowa.edu/sercc/sites/medicine.uiowa.edu.sercc/files/webform/2BUL-free-fortnite-skin-generator-model-modded-skins-vd2e.pdf

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