NEW YORK — Black people are more likely to be jailed for weapons possession than other New Yorkers — giving public defenders and civil rights advocates reason to support last week’s Supreme Court ruling expected to ease the process of getting a license to carry a gun.
The defense lawyers’ unlikely alliance with the NRA-affiliated group of New York gun owners who brought the Supreme Court case is based partly on the argument that New York’s laws restricting gun owners’ right to carry weapons had racist underpinnings.
“Society as a whole has a dramatically different view of Black people carrying guns that it does of white people,” said Ron Kuby, a civil rights lawyer
“With white people, they see decent honest hardworking citizens,” Kuby said. “And when they look at Black men with guns, they see menace, danger and threat. And that has been true since the founding of the republic.”
Of the 440 people in New York City jails Thursday awaiting trial in cases where felony weapons possession was the top charge, 69% were Black, 23% Hispanic, 5% white, and 3% Asian, according to the Data Collaborative for Justice at John Jay College.
Black New Yorkers — who make up 24% of the city’s population — are jailed pretrial on firearms charges in nearly three times their proportion of the general population, the numbers show.
A group of Black Legal Aid lawyers as well as public defender organizations in the Bronx and Brooklyn filed a brief with the Supreme Court in 2021 supporting gun rights groups’ effort to overturn New York’s license to carry laws, which date to 1911.
“[Virtually] all our clients whom New York prosecutes for exercising their Second Amendment right are Black or Hispanic,” said the brief.
“And that is no accident,” the brief says. “New York enacted its firearm licensing requirements to criminalize gun ownership by racial and ethnic minorities.…
“New York police have stopped, questioned, and frisked our clients on the streets. They have invaded our clients’ homes with guns drawn, terrifying them, their families, and their children….
“They have deprived our clients of their jobs, children, livelihoods, and ability to live in this country. And they have branded our clients as ‘criminals’ and ‘violent felons’ for life. They have done all of this only because our clients exercised a constitutional right.”
The brief cited the stories of several Black defendants whose lives were upended by their failure to obey New York laws making it difficult to get a license to carry a firearm.
One was a combat-decorated Iraq war veteran who had no criminal history before the NYPD arrested her for bringing a gun she legally owned in her home state to New York City on a trip with her kids to see their father.
The felony arrest resulted in her losing custody of her children.
Another was a single dad who had been shot and slashed in the face as a teenager and saw his child psychology studies derailed after his imprisonment for carrying a weapon for protection.
A small handgun found under the bed of a lifelong city employee — in a police search later found unlawful — resulted in the elderly man’s jailing while he was recovering from chemotherapy.
The Black public defenders’ brief argued: “Throughout the twentieth century, racial fear continued to drive New York’s firearm regulation scheme, which consciously excluded people of color in continued violation of the Fourteenth Amendment” to the Constitution, which guarantees everyone “equal protection of the laws.”
Kuby believes the Supreme Court’s ruling is a step towards decarceration — the movement to send fewer people to prison. But he is alarmed at the decision’s broad effect on gun laws.
“For those of us who believe in decarceration, this will help decarcerate,” said Kuby. “Frankly, it’s not the way I wanted it.”
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