“Convicted Felon Sues State Over Right To Bear Arms”
The title of this post is the headline of this notable press story sent to me by a helpful reader. Here is how the piece starts:
A Franklin man is suing the state of Tennessee for not honoring a pardon allowing him the right to bear arms. David Scott Blackwell received a felony charge for drug possession in 1988, when he was 20 years old.
“I was young and dumb and moved from a small town in Mississippi and got involved with the wrong crowd in Atlanta,” said Blackwell. “I’d sold some cocaine to an undercover officer. Boom – I went to prison, went to jail.”
After serving his sentence and earning a bachelor’s degree in nursing, the father said he petitioned the state of Georgia for a pardon, including the restoration of the right to bear arms, which was granted on August 11, 2003.
Blackwell ran into a problem in Tennessee. “Wanted to go hunting about two years ago and went to purchase a little .22 rifle for my son, and was denied,” said Blackwell.
After two years of going back and forth with the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation and the Attorney General’s office, Blackwell decided to file a declaratory relief lawsuit against the State of Tennessee, Governor Phil Bredesen and Attorney General Bob Cooper.
The lawsuit was filed in Davidson County Chancery Court on Thursday morning, and served to the state later that afternoon. Cooper’s office had no comment on the lawsuit, but said they are in the process of reviewing it.
“It is just amazing to me that if you have a pardon, a full pardon that specifically gives you restoration of rights that the attorney general can say ‘no, you’re not a person. You have no rights. You don’t have the same rights as anyone else,'” said Blackwell’s attorney David Raybin.
“According to the attorney general, even if the governor of Tennessee pardoned a person in Tennessee, that wouldn’t help them,” continued Raybin. “Under the attorney general’s opinion, there’s no power on the planet that can restore his right to have a firearm and I reject that. I think that’s wrong.”
“We call it a Department of Corrections, not a Department of Punishment,” said Blackwell. “We all want people to be corrected in their behavior, but there has to be that touchdown, that goal line that somebody can attain to become a citizen again.”
A few related Second Amendment posts:
- Fascinating little expungement ruling concerning Second Amendment rights from the Sixth Circuit
- North Carolina Supreme Court finds state constitutional right for some felons to bear arms
- SCOTUS undercuts constitutional gun rights in Hayes without even mentioning Heller or Second Amendment
- Given Hayes, can jurisdictions criminalize gun possession by any misdemeanant?
- The lack of originalist justification for excluding felons from the Second Amendment
- Assailing the unjustified Second Amendment limits in Heller
- Heller‘s impact on felon-in-possession crimes finally starting to generate attention
- Might Judge Sotomayor think the Second Amendment “deserves to be on equal footing with the First Amendment” for ex-cons?
- Notable new Alaska appellate decision on denying gun rights to non-violent felons
- “Why Can’t Martha Stewart Have a Gun?”
UPDATE: Thand to Blackwell’s attorney David Raybin, I have a copy of the complaint filed in Blackwell v. Bredesen, which can now be downloaded here: