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To be clear here, this is no actual recorded statement like this. There is a claim by the defense attorney that they were told this by the judge, but there is nothing to support it but his word and his word alone. Maybe it happened, but "defense lawyer claimed something" is not that much without anything else to support it. Even then, even if it did happen, a judge of a criminal court is a very low level position with multiple appeals courts above them. Their word is not final.
If you were living in almost any other country, we wouldn't even be having this conversation. You would simply not have a gun, and you would not be able to make meaningful legal appeal otherwise.
That's actually a quirk of how the law works, that presidents have used in various ways already even today. Consider for instance the Trump tariffs in place for a year were ruled unconstitutional! And in response the Trump admin has pivoted to another, most likely also unconstitutional, means of implementing his tariffs. But likely doesn't mean it has been ruled on in this specific way, and the US legal system assumes new decisions like that is lawful until otherwise said. You and "your tribe" is benefiting from this just the same. Trump gets to fuck around with the economic wellbeing of companies all around the country at his whim because of this presumption.
That it takes time to sort out many wrongdoings is not a great criticism, no system can have immediate and perfect retification. Come up with one that does first before whining that one of the most consistently successful and free country in the world can't do the impossible.
Ugh, I'm sorry for doing this without responding first to the earlier conversation thread, but:
TheNybblr has made his situation clear, and there's an active court cases with arguments next month over that class of problem; it's not a hypothetical.
Do you believe Dexter Taylor will have a meaningful appeal that either clearly debunks the defense lawyer's claim or sends the case back for a retrial? How about Malinowski? Will New York Citiers be allowed to own stun guns?
The first one is pretty simple, bans on gun ownership for people who have involuntary committed is a common law. Texas and Florida both do it as well. Requiring you submit your history of commitments seems a reasonable part of the ban there. Again, Texas and Florida do a very similar thing except their process is automated https://giffords.org/lawcenter/state-laws/mental-health-reporting-in-florida/
So if anything NJ is lighter there and doesn't pry into your history until you try to get a gun, instead of having a database of everyone by default. Of course this privacy results in requiring personal submission on application instead.
This is the thing most likely to be unconstitutional. Challenge it in court and let the process play out. I never claimed that would be oppressors don't exist, I said that they occur at the margins. Requiring two references is a margin, and even while it's probably going to be ruled unconstitutional, personally it's not a great sign for Nybbler if it's truly stopping him personally from getting a gun.
Because either
He was involuntary committed, and thus wouldn't be able to get one in Florida or Texas either.
He doesn't have two people in his life who trust him to own a firearm and going out of state is easier than finding and convincing other people (many who would be republicans or pro 2nd amendment as New Jersey is a 50/46 state) that he is safe.
It shouldn't be a requirement, but also casually speaking big red flag IMO. I have like ten people in my immediate life who could easily do so if it was required.
We'll see! I don't know the exact specifics of his case and the law as written and what the higher courts will decide based on those. But how would the appeal "debunk the defense lawyer's claim"? He's claiming the judge said something in private, unless he has actual evidence the appeals court isn't going to care. A defense attorney can't say "Dear appeals court, I overheard the judge in the bathroom say he just decided at random. I'm the only one who heard it and there's no recording but please trust me please". He's gonna have to show proof.
No. "the name and hospital affiliation of any mental health practitioner you have ever seen, since birth". Not anywhere you've been involuntarily committed. Any mental health practitioner, you have seen, over your entire lifespan. Talk to a licensed MHP as a high school guidance counselor, and it's technically required. And you have to sign a disclosure request so they can ask hospitals actively.
(Bonus: any errors in an application, even honest mistakes, can be and are used to on their own act as sufficient cause to reject a permit to purchase.)
New Jersey does run its own Point of Contact system including a mental health database. They just also require active disclosure of everything else, too.
((New Jersey, by statute, also prohibits firearm permits from being issued to anyone with a voluntary mental health commitment, though that's not relevant here except to show it's also more aggressive than Florida in stupid ways.))
The specific New Jersey requirement's legal challenges have been bound up by some case consolidation and standing
delatory tacticsproblems, but we do have other circuits who have looked at those policies and decided they were a-OK. My personal favorite is Antonyuk, where the character references survived because there was an imaginable circumstance where they could be constitutionally applied, and because buying and gun and possessing a gun are different. So the challenge has been live since 2022, the district court's stay of other parts of the law that were blatantly unconstitutional was reflexively stayed and never went into effect.SCOTUS booted the case there back down, without any process protecting the plaintiff's rights in the meantime, and given Rahimi, very little chance of the Second Circuit changing their minds or New Jersey behaving any better. SCOTUS doesn't care. It's not a random illegal-immigrant with a human trafficking background on a holiday weekend.
His primary stopping point is the disclosure requirement; he does not have those names of professionals. Beyond that, many jurisdictions will actively refuse character references from out of county, and the law permits them to reject references arbitrarily.
I don't see where you're getting "in private" from, but the trivial and poor debunking would be to say "that didn't happen" or "there is no evidence of this claim", in their own writing. A stronger one would be something along the lines of "here's the trial transcript, it ain't in it".
I'm not asking you whether they'll have a perfect debunk. I'm predicting -- and willing to bet at nontrivial odds -- that they're not going to try.
You're absolutely right in the sense that appeals court isn't going to care. They don't need to debate whether it happened. That's the process.
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New Jersey's law demands an accounting of all psychiatrists that evaluated you regardless of whether those evaluations were connected to judicial proceedings, not the very narrow category of involuntary commitments ordered by a judge after a psychiatric evaluation.
Ah well that probably is overreaching then. Regardless it doesn't change much as my claim has never been that government doesn't do unconstitutional things, it's that they do it at the margins.
Either by severity, like two references and mental health history is still a pretty doable task as opposed to a straight up ban which wouldn't allow you a gun at all or through time such as Trump illegally stealing billions from American companies through tariffs.
We have two choices here. Presume government is acting legally until ruled otherwise by courts or presume government they're acting illegally and prevent government from doing anything until they affirmatively prove their case. Our founding fathers decided the former is preferable in the design of US government.
Does this seem like a good description of Caetano turning to Calce?
I know the process arguments: Caetano was a per curiam, not a ruling; the eventual decision in a different case after the state mooted Caetano only bound Massachusetts (and arguably not even them); yada yada standing self-mooting yada. But those are only arguments about how the process got here. They say nothing about whether the process is reasonable or correct.
Because it seems wildly insufficient to affirmatively prove that the government's acting illegally. Caetano did that in 2016.
And people clearly believe that, for rights they care about, and sometimes even for stupid shit like people appreciating the view of a building. Courts are quite happy to throw out preliminary injunctions and temporary restraining orders, even post-CASA and even where the government is quite likely to win the eventual case. We have processes that could be used to evaluate whether new, poorly-defined, and likely unconstitutional laws should go into effect or be delayed. They just aren't: see Illinois v. Due Process for a trivial example that SCOTUS didn't care about either.
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When you make an appeal to reasonable deference due to a lack of systemic overreach, it is no longer 'regardless' if the systemic overreach is at what you dismiss as the margins. Your outgroup is by its nature at the margins of your consideration.
'I do not mind constitutional rights being revoked for my outgroup' is not a defense.
Why only two? Why are you unable to come up with other choices of how to perceive and proceed?
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