Charles Foehner Faces Life in Prison for Owning Firearms Without a License
A New York Metropolis man is dealing with a mound of felony prices and a sentence that will quantity to life in jail after he shot and killed a person who, in line with surveillance footage, was trying to mug him.
The kicker: The federal government seems to agree with the defendant, Charles Foehner, on not less than one main level: that the taking pictures was justified.
Certainly, prosecutors haven’t tried to indict Foehner, 65, on any homicide-related cost. The counts he is dealing with—there have been reportedly greater than two dozen of them at his arraignment—are associated to felony possession of assorted weapons, after police searched his condominium and located that solely a few of his firearms are licensed with the state.
In different phrases, he’s staring down many years behind bars for having weapons that did not have the right stamp of approval from bureaucrats, regardless of the federal government conceding that the sensible use of his weapon—in service of defending his life—was defensible.
At round 2 a.m. on June 1, video reveals Foehner strolling backward slowly up a driveway as Cody Gonzalez, 32, assailed him exterior a parking storage in Queens. Foehner pulled out his gun, which didn’t deter Gonzalez from persevering with to lunge towards him. After Foehner fired the deadly pictures, Gonzalez will be seen briefly sprinting within the different route earlier than collapsing.
“The defendant was on the road with a loaded, unlicensed gun,” mentioned Decide Jerry Iannece of Queens Legal Court docket in an early June listening to, throughout which he set bail at $50,000—double what the workplace of Queens District Legal professional Melinda Katz sought. “There are too many shootings on this metropolis! The courtroom is kind of involved with what we see.”
In some sense, it is troublesome to disagree with Iannece on the latter level: Although violent crime in New York Metropolis has just lately seen a major decline, the variety of lethal shootings would, in an ideal world, be zero. Apparently misplaced on him, nevertheless, is that exercising the proper to self-defense will not be a criminal offense. The courtroom must be extra involved that Foehner is dealing with the remainder of his pure life in a cage for what primarily quantities to an administrative fake pas—extra time than Gonzalez, who had not less than 15 prior arrests, had spent behind bars, and extra time than he would have gotten had he survived and confronted prosecution for the tried mugging.
“You may have New York Metropolis saying, ‘Sure, this mugger with this prolonged historical past, he is not somebody who might be going to finish up in jail for a very long time, however the man who defends himself in opposition to the mugger, who’s in any other case a peaceful citizen, that is the man who deserves life in jail,'” says Amy Swearer, a senior authorized fellow who focuses on Second Modification points at The Heritage Basis. “It would not make any sense.”
It’s significantly nonsensical in opposition to the present political backdrop, the place felony justice reform has been touted as a paramount precedence in left-leaning jurisdictions throughout the nation. Katz, who introduced the fees, has described herself as a “progressive prosecutor.” But, it’s troublesome to have a look at her remedy of Foehner and see it as something however a success of the worst stereotypes characterizing the “robust on crime” motion—by which an iron fist flattens individuals with spurious felony prices, ruining their lives within the course of.
That pivot can, not less than partly, be defined by the overall aversion many left-leaning people should weapons. It is value noting, although, that a few of the progressives closest to the authorized system perceive the issue for what it’s: overcriminalization.
One such instance: In 2021, public defenders with The Black Attorneys of Authorized Help, The Bronx Defenders, and Brooklyn Defender Providers filed an amicus transient supporting the plaintiffs in New York State Rifle & Pistol Affiliation, Inc. v. Bruen, a landmark 2022 Supreme Court docket determination by which a majority of the justices hamstrung a New York regulation governing hid carry, thus increasing individuals’s proper to publicly possess weapons for self-defense.
“The integrated Second Modification affords the individuals ‘the proper to maintain and bear arms.’ Regardless of the clear textual content and this Court docket’s precedent, New York’s licensing regime does the alternative,” wrote these public defenders of their transient to the Court docket. “It deprives everybody of that proper, solely returning it to these choose few who handle to first safe a firearm license from the police. For everybody else, possession of a firearm is successfully a ‘violent felony,’ punishable by 3.5 to fifteen years in jail.”
They supplied a number of case research centered round individuals whose lives had been equally upended. Amongst them had been Benjamin Prosser and Sam Little, who had each been victims of violent crimes and who at the moment are thought-about “violent felons” within the eyes of the state merely for carrying a firearm with out the mandated authorities approval. Little, a single father who had beforehand been slashed within the face, was separated from his household whereas he served his sentence on the Vernon C. Bain Heart, a infamous jail that floats on the East River. The conviction destroyed his nascent profession, with the Division of Training rescinding its provide of employment.
These names did not make headlines. However there are a lot of like them, and like Charles Foehner, whose “violent crime” was working afoul of licensing legal guidelines. “Disproportionately, it finally ends up being individuals of colour who do get tagged with these violent felony offenses, with these necessary minimums, not as a result of they’re violent,” says Swearer, “however as a result of they’ve the audacity to train their Second Modification rights with out leaping via the entire time-consuming and costly boundaries.”
However maybe most fraught is that Foehner had fulfilled the licensing necessities for 5 of his firearms, that means the state acknowledged and understood that he was an upstanding citizen. He had simply uncared for to do the identical for the totality of his weapons assortment—nearly definitely a results of the process being time- and cost-intensive. “The only distinction,” provides Swearer, “is that he didn’t undergo the opposite arbitrary and capricious and time-consuming and costly course of to get particularly a pistol license.” Not everybody has a whole bunch of {dollars} to burn.
How a lot time Foehner could spend behind bars will probably activate whether or not or not he decides to go to trial. It shouldn’t be stunning that the D.A. bombarded him with an intensive laundry record of prices, as prosecutors usually overcharge with the intention to scare defendants into taking a plea discount. Trials are unsure, in spite of everything. So, although Charles Foehner could know deep down he’s harmless, he must resolve if his insistence is value the remainder of his life.
