TALLAHASSEE – The Florida Supreme Court has declined to consider up a obstacle to the constitutionality of a state legislation that bars the possession of guns by convicted felons.
Justices on Monday issued an buy rejecting an appeal by William Edenfield, who was charged with possession of a firearm by a convicted felon soon after a 2020 shooting incident in Leon County. Edenfield went to the Supreme Court in August following the 1st District Court docket of Charm turned down his Second Amendment arguments.
Edenfield’s problem centered on a 2022 U.S. Supreme Court docket decision in a scenario known as New York Point out Rifle & Pistol Affiliation v. Bruen. In that scenario, the U.S. Supreme Court docket required analyzing gun limitations by whether or not they are constant with the nation’s “historic custom of firearm regulation.”
In an August transient submitted at the Florida Supreme Courtroom, Edenfield’s legal professional, Tyler Kemper Payne, wrote that the 1st District Court of Attractiveness interpreted the Bruen conclusion to “read into the 2nd Amendment a limitation to only ‘law-abiding dependable citizens.’ These types of a qualification is discovered nowhere in the Second Amendment’s managing text. The district courtroom cited nearly no historic evidence in assist of this limitation.”
“In shorter, the district court expressly construed the Second Modification, a provision of the federal Structure, by limiting its scope and discovering the prohibition at concern traditionally supported,” Payne, an assistant public defender in the 2nd Judicial Circuit, wrote. “Petitioner (Edenfield) asks this (Florida Supreme) Court to accept jurisdiction to resolve irrespective of whether Florida’s prohibition on felons from possessing firearms continues to be constitutional in the wake of Bruen.”
But in a short submitted in Oct, legal professionals in Florida Legal professional Typical Ashley Moody’s place of work wrote that the U.S. Supreme Court has “been very clear that longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons do not infringe the Second Modification.”
“Petitioner (Edenfield) cites no case in which a courtroom has held that a felon-dispossession legislation is facially unconstitutional underneath the 2nd Modification,” the state’s attorneys wrote. “On the opposite, the courts overwhelmingly have upheld the validity of felon-dispossession laws even soon after Bruen.”
As is popular, the Florida Supreme Courtroom on Monday did not clarify its causes for declining to choose up the obstacle.
But in a May possibly 31 decision, a 3-judge panel of the 1st District Courtroom of Charm stated a “critique of the pertinent precedent from the United States Supreme Courtroom on the Second Modification demonstrates that a felon, this sort of as appellant (Edenfield), even now can not declare an unfettered constitutional suitable to possess a firearm article Bruen.”
The state’s transient filed at the Supreme Court mentioned a jury convicted Edenfield of two counts of aggravated battery with a fatal weapon and just one rely of possession of a firearm by a convicted felon in the 2020 incident.
Edenfield, now 67, experienced previous convictions on theft and burglary rates, according to the Florida Department of Corrections website. He is an inmate at Blackwater Correctional Facility.
