Posted on 06/20/2002 6:29:35 AM PDT by Pern
WASHINGTON, June 18 (UPI) -- Project Safe Neighborhood, which was created by President George W. Bush and Attorney General John Ashcroft and promises tougher federal enforcement of existing state firearm laws, violates the U.S. Constitution and can lead to serious miscarriages of justice, according to a policy analyst and attorney with an influential Washington think tank.
Analysts at some think tanks agree with the conclusions of the study, "There Goes the Neighborhood," released by the libertarian Cato Institute. Others say the arguments of Gene Healy, the report's author, are unfounded and based on a narrow political agenda.
No one, however, disputes the far-reaching effect of the "Safe Neighborhood" plan. About $230 million is being spent on it in 2002, and another $200 is million is planned for 2003, to hire and train at least 113 new assistant U.S. attorneys and 580 state and local attorneys exclusively to prosecute firearm violations. The new assistant U.S. attorneys will coordinate the effort with state and local prosecutors in each of the 94 federal judicial districts across the country.
In his report, Healy argues that Project Safe Neighborhood flies in the face of the U.S. Constitution's Tenth Amendment, which enumerates the federal government's powers and states that all other powers not mentioned there will be left up to the states or the people to determine.
"The Constitution provides an exceedingly slender grant of authority over criminal law," enumerating only three crimes that are federal: counterfeiting, piracy, and treason," Healy says.
Safe Neighborhood brings with it a host of troubling consequences, says Healy. "Project Safe Neighborhood's federalization of crime ... distract(s) the federal courts by greatly exacerbating the strain on the court system," he says. Under Project Exile -- the prototype program for Project Safe Neighborhood -- "the number of civil trials has decreased (in federal court) to make way for a growing number of criminal cases, often run-of-the-mill crimes traditionally handled by the states," he says.
Under Project Safe Neighborhood, Congress can circumvent Constitutional limits, says Healy. By giving the states $75 million to hire and train the 580 new state and local prosecutors, Congress, not the states, is in charge because the funding is available only if it is used to hire the prosecutors who pursue gun law violations full-time.
"By employing spending power, Congress can direct the administration of state-level criminal justice ... and dictate prosecution of virtually any crime within the ambit of state police powers," says Healy. Here the separation of state and federal authority, as stated in the Constitution, is endangered, he says.
Healy says that Project Safe Neighborhood prosecutors now have the monetary incentive from the federal government to focus on the numbers and to indict and convict regardless of a case's merit, which leads to "assembly line justice," says Healy. "The incentive structure that Safe Neighborhoods sets up will lead to the proliferation of 'garbage' gun charges -- technical violations of firearms statutes on which no sensible prosecutor would expend his energy," he says.
Even worse, Healy believes, are the "appalling miscarriages of justice" for individuals. In April 1999, for instance, Brian Ford went to into a Fairfax County, Va., pawnshop to hock a Civil War era rifle for $35. A few weeks later, due to a police background check, Ford was arrested for being a felon in possession of a firearm because of previous convictions for burglary.
"Had his case gone to federal court, he would have faced extensive jail time," writes Healy. "But Fairfax did not have a federal Project Exile program (at the time), so the jury was free to recommend a $1,250 fine and no jail time."
Allowing prosecutors to determine the court -- federal or state -- in which an individual will be tried also causes severe problems, says Healy.
"In some cases, federal prosecutors have deliberately used Project Exile to secure a jury with a different racial composition than would otherwise be available at the state level," says Healy. "In Richmond, Va., where Project Exile was first implemented, the jury pool for the state-level circuit court is approximately 75 percent African American. In contrast, the jury pool for the Eastern District of Virginia, from which federal criminal cases are drawn in the Richmond area, is only about 10 percent African American," according to the report.
"Federalizing street crimes offends our Constitutional separation of powers and damages the federal and local justice systems by clogging federal courts with individual small-time criminal cases," says Andres Soto, policy director of the Pacific Center for Violence Prevention in San Francisco. The center, which is part of the Trauma Foundation at San Francisco General Hospital, addresses causes of youth violence.
A letter cited in Healy's report, from Richard L. Williams, chief judge of the U.S. District Court in Richmond, to Chief Justice of the Supreme Court William Rehnquist, confirms Soto's point: "Project Exile 'transformed (our court) into a minor-grade police court,'" it says.
"These tactics also create a false impression of state courts being incapable of handling serious crime," Soto adds.
"If you look at the (state) court records (in Richmond before Project Exile) prosecutors have had good reasons not to prosecute," says John Lott, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington. Lott agrees with Healy that Safe Neighborhoods give the wrong incentives to prosecutors. "You have ... the local government getting benefits without bearing the costs," says Lott. When federal monetary incentives are used to control state or local agencies, they often do not work as intended, he says.
Analysts at several other organizations disagree with Healy, including think tanks and lobbying groups with very different political tilts, such the liberal Progressive Policy Institute, the National Rifle Association, and Handgun Control, Inc.
"Instead of chasing gun makers into court, this administration is going to chase violent criminals into prison," said James Jay Baker, executive director of the NRA Institute for Legislative Affairs, in his speech at the organization's 2002 annual meeting. "Attorney General Ashcroft ... is going to run the system as Congress intended, so that only criminals, not honest citizens, are denied access to firearms," he said. "We welcome his move to take Project Exile nationwide. It is a move long advocated by this organization," he said.
"The Supreme Court has looked at all these (possession) statutes over the years, and I don't think (Safe Neighborhoods) is (causing) a Constitutional crisis," says Sean Kirkendalo, director of government relations for PSComm, LLC. "Over the long haul, the idea is to turn the effort back to the states," says Kirkendalo, who works on policy issues with John Cohen, director of the Progressive Policy Institute's Community Crime Fighting Project.
Instead, Kirkendalo worries that Safe Neighborhoods is not adequately publicized. Project Exile's success was based largely on its publicity campaign, he says. Billboards along highways in Richmond warned potential violators: "Illegal gun possession gets you five years in federal prison."
When he announced Project Safe Neighborhoods, Attorney General Ashcroft made a strong case for its effectiveness: "Since 1997, when Project Exile was begun in Richmond, homicides have dropped 48 percent, the lowest level since 1983," he said.
Healy, however, finds even this argument unconvincing. "Gun-related homicides and other violent crime dropped significantly all across the country during the same time period (from 1997 to 1999), and criminologists do not agree about the cause of that decline," he says. "If a more aggressive crime control effort would bring substantial benefits, there is absolutely no reason that it cannot be undertaken by state law enforcement personnel," he says.
Healy believes the president should withdraw his support for Project Safe Neighborhoods and adhere to his campaign promise to "respect federalism and the Tenth Amendment."
"Federal, state and local resources are better spent supporting violence prevention efforts and comprehensive regulation of firearm manufacture and distribution, than on the costly and ineffective federal prosecution of individual gun crimes," says Amy Fairweather, co-author with Soto of a study on Project Exile, and an attorney with the Pacific Center for Violence Prevention.
"Promising federal programs include federal financial aid for community-based violence prevention programs, a uniform database of firearm death and injury ... and regulatory oversight of gun manufacturers, distributors, and dealers," says Fairweather.
I've seen parts of this somewhere, but I'm not sure if it made Free Republic yet.
Narrow political agenda: Individual liberty and limited Constitutional government.
What ever happened to those illegal 'converted' rifles that were in that church they burned down ?
They are in the same place with the front door with all the machinegun holes in it.
Now that the Democratic party and its fellow travelers are on the verge of becoming a historical footnote to what the people want and who is in power, they are again, picking up the mantel of "defenders of the common man and the bill of rights." I can just hear shocked democrats say to each other lets keep this evil Bush and Ascroft from giving money to local governments to fight crime at the local level. Then trying to figure out how to sell it to their various constituency groups.
Hey if the criminal class is actually convicted of a felony, it makes it a lot harder for them to vote Democrat. Hey, if the justice system actually has the money to prosecute crimes, a bunch of our friends and family may go to jail! Hey maybe we can scare some of the right wingers into believing this is bad, because it will increase gun law violation prosecutions!
I have long said that I would rather see existing gun laws prosecuted than to see more knee-jerk laws put on the books. Yes, there are bunch of gun laws that are just plain stupid and should be removed. However, lets put a stop to the sillyness of wanting more and more new gun laws, by starting to really enforce the ones that are on the books and them maybe we can whip up some public concern to repeal some of the more silly ones rather than be faced with another layer of new "gun control" laws.
I agree. If the unintended consequences of enforcing unConstitutional gun laws is that more cases reach the higher courts, forcing them to frequently confront the clear language of the Second Amendment, then I predict eventually the Supreme Court will have to rule.
The Constitution explicitly provides power to regulate inter-state commerce. There is no grant of power to regulate firearms, despite what Ashcroft has said. The Second Amendment prohibits infringement of the right. I don't know how our Founders could have made things clearer. The "Congress shall pass no law" language is probably preferable to "shall not be infringed", but then the anti-gunners would be jubilant, claiming that the states may outlaw arms altogether.
I challenge anyone to come up with language which would unambiguously protect our right to keep and bear arms as our Founders wished.
Can't be true, I read right here that Ashcroft wanted the broadest
interpretation of the second ammendment, concerning Individual
gun rights.
Ok, I'll bite:
1.Statement of rights. For self defense against criminals and beasts, and for sport, and for protection from invasion, and for protection against tyranny in government, and for other reasons not herein enumerated, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed, neither by the states, nor by the federal government. Neither shall this right ever be made into a privilege, such as by requiring special taxes, licenses, or fees, or photos, fingerprints or any other personally identifying information, or any other government-controlled or dispensed permission, in order to keep, carry, transact, transport, store, possess, lawfully use, or manufacture arms.
2. State powers. States individually make the sole determination what constitutes lawful use within their borders, but may not ever ban or regulate self-defense against deadly threats, nor the practice of carrying concealed handguns to accomplish this.
3. Parental/Guardian responsibility. Parents are responsible for the actions of their children up until the latter reach legal adulthood, and have the duty to restrict access to guns until safety and awareness training has been accomplished.
4. Registration prohibited. No governmental agency may ever collect any information that could be used to compile registration lists of privately-held guns.
5. NBC Weapons. These rights do not extend to nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons, other than those in use by US infantry or police officers.
6. Suspension of rights, responsibility to them. Those in government custody, or who are under indictment for a violent felony, may not claim protection of their rights under this amendment, however, the government is held liable for the safety of those actually in custody, and for wrongful detention. These rights shall not be suspended for any person for any crime of misdemeanor nor any non-violent felony, except during that person's actual custody or incarceration. When prisoners are duly released from incarceration, these rights are fully restored, and sentences are to be crafted with this knowledge.
7. Castes prohibited. In no case shall separate castes or classes of people be created, such that persons wishing to exercise their rights under this article need to establish or demonstrate their eligibility to exercise these rights, not by having government agents with superior rights, nor by mandating background checks that presume people to be violent felons unless they can demonstrate otherwise.
8. Individual responsibility for self defense. Inasmuch as the government has no responsibility to protect individual free citizens, and will not be held liable even if such protection is promised but fails, citizens are strongly urged to consider their own responsibility of self-defense to themselves and their loved ones, and exercise these rights appropriately, but not at public expense.
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