Ya gotta just love the Internet:
"Hinchey broke D.C. gun law," Poughkeepsie Journal, 3 December 1994.
Rep. Maurice Hinchey (D-NY) was caught illegally carrying a handgun in Northern Virginia in 1994. (11) Fortunately for him, he was not caught near his home in the District where the handgun is illegal and would have netted Mr. Hinchey a much more serious penalty.
CONGRESSMAN CAUGHT IN THE ACT, PART II
Rep. Maurice Hinchey (D-NY) pleaded no contest Jan. 5 to a charge of carrying a loaded handgun in his baggage at Washington National Airport and was given a "suspended imposition of sentence."
Hinchey's lawyer, David Lenefsky, said, "We did not plead guilty to anything because we had no intent to violate any statute."
Lenefsky said that by his plea Hinchey acknowledged the handgun was his and that he had a license to carry it in New York, but not in Virginia.
"The handgun was inadvertently in a piece of luggage I took from my upstate New York home when I drove back to Washington for the late-November congressional session, and it was still in that piece of unopened luggage on Dec. 1 when I decided to fly back to New York," Hinchey said in a statement.
Hinchey, who voted for the anti-gun Brady Bill, appeared before Judge Joseph Gwaltney in a county district court. The judge's slap-on-the-wrist ruling means sentencing was suspended and will be lifted automatically in a year. You know what would have happened if it had been you instead of a Congressman_you'd get out of prison some time in the Twenty-Third Century.
=================================
"The money from the bank was inadvertently in the bag in the back seat of my car," said the man accused of bank robbery.