Investigative reporters at USA Today have discovered an unusual problem with the North Carolina criminal justice system. Based on court records and interviews with government officials, the investigation revealed more than 60 men who went to prison for violating federal gun possession laws even though courts have since determined that what they did was not actually against federal laws.
Many of the men are still imprisoned and have no idea they are legally innocent. Although the legal issues are complicated and unique to North Carolina, everyone, including the Justice Department, agrees that the men were convicted of something that is not a crime. All the men were convicted of being a felon unlawfully in possession of a firearm. However, the problem is that none of the men had criminal records serious enough to be considered a felon under federal law.
Still, the Justice Department has done nothing to secure the release of men still in prison or those on federal probation. The Justice Department maintains that it is not their job to notify prisoners that they are innocent.
Even if the men contact an attorney to help them, the cases are far from open-and-shut. The legal issues are complex and involve a muddy intersection of state and federal laws. To make matters worse, current legal procedures are ill-suited to this type of problem. The main type of post-conviction relief, the writ of habeas corpus, can only be used to challenge constitutional violations and innocence isn’t a constitutional right. Ripley Rand, the U.S. Attorney in Greensboro, told USA Today that prosecutors acted swiftly to dismiss all wrong pending charges but for the men whose cases are already final he is “not aware of any procedural mechanism by which [the men] can be afforded relief.”
The first step is determining who is wrongly imprisoned and notifying them. No one is sure exactly how many people were incorrectly charged with being a felon in possession of a firearm. Rand estimated that up to one third of the gun cases his office has prosecuted since 1993 could be in question. North Carolina courts have asked public defenders to review cases and seek out the defendants. However, the reviews are difficult and involve hunting through files in courthouses across the state. Still, there is hope that at least the men identified by the USA Today investigation might be released if prosecutors cooperate.
Read the full story here.
