As a five-time convicted felon, Glen Prince was facing a mandatory minimum 15 years behind bars when he was charged in federal court with being a felon in possession of a handgun stemming from an armed robbery on CTA train in 2021.
Instead, Prince’s case was tossed out earlier this month by a federal judge who ruled the statute barring felons from possessing handguns is unconstitutional in light of a recent U.S. Supreme Court decision.
The ruling by U.S. District Judge Robert Gettleman is the first of its kind to come down in Chicago’s federal court and joins a host of other similar cases that have thrown the decades-old law into a sort of legal limbo as the issue works its way back to the high court.
The implications are particularly large in Chicago, where there are hundreds of pending felon-with-firearm cases stemming largely from the U.S. attorney’s office efforts to throw federal law enforcement resources into the fight against the city’s relentless gun violence.
Gettleman’s Nov. 2 ruling in Prince’s case was immediately appealed by the U.S. attorney’s office. The 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has set a Dec. 19 deadline for prosecutors to file a brief, court records show.
It contradicts a handful of recent rulings by other district judges here upholding the felon-with-firearm law, saying that Second Amendment protections on gun possession have traditionally applied only to “law-abiding citizens.”
On the national level, the U.S. Justice Department last month urged the Supreme Court to overturn a lower-court ruling in Philadelphia that the law violated the constitutional rights of a man who possessed a weapon after pleading guilty years earlier to food-stamp fraud.
The Biden administration argued in its petition that the ruling conflicts decisions from two other appeals courts upholding the ban and “opened the courthouse doors to an untold number of future challenges by other felons.”
“Many aspects of Second Amendment doctrine rest on the premise that the amendment protects only law-abiding citizens, not felons,” Justice Department lawyers wrote.
Congress first instituted a ban on citizens convicted of certain felonies from possessing handguns in the 1930s, but it wasn’t until 1961 that a blanket lifetime ban firearm possession was instituted for all convicted felons.
Last year, the Supreme Court’s 6-3 ruling in New York Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen greatly expanded Second Amendment protections by imposing a new constitutional test requiring gun laws to be “historically” consistent with laws on the books in the 17th and 18th centuries.
That “Bruen” test has already led to some formerly mainstream gun safety regulations being overturned in other states, including bans on people with pending domestic-violence restraining orders from having a firearm, provisions limiting guns at summer camps and churches, and even a law requiring guns to have serial numbers.
In his opinion throwing out the charge against Prince, Gettleman wrote that while the government has historically prohibited certain people from possessing guns, prosecutors had not met their burden “to prove that felons are excluded from ‘the people’ whose firearm possession is presumptively protected by the plain text of the Second Amendment.”
Gettleman said the blanket ban on felons having guns “imposes a far greater burden” on gun rights than other historical categorical exclusions, such as one during the Revolutionary War when “individuals who refused to declare a loyalty oath to the emerging government” were barred from having firearms.
The judge also wrote the fact that modern guns are more deadly and violence is more prevalent in today’s society doesn’t “justify a different result.”
“This nation’s gun violence problem is devastating, but does not change this result under Bruen, which this court finds rests on the severity of (the felon-with-firearm law) rather than its categorical prohibition.”
Gettleman did, however, note the issue was a “close question” in his mind, as “violence plagues our communities and that allowing those who potentially pose a threat to the orderly functioning of society to be armed is a dangerous precedent.”
“Although there are strong policy reasons for doing everything possible to keep guns off our streets and out of our communities — policies that could be addressed by legislation rather than judicial edict — this court can find no such historical analog,” Gettleman wrote.
Prince, 37, was ordered released from the Metropolitan Correctional Center the day after Gettleman’s decision — but he didn’t walk free, records show.
Court records show Chicago police arrested him at the jail at 71 W. Van Buren St. on new charges filed in Cook County accusing him of being an armed habitual criminal. He’s now being held without bond in Cook County Jail.
According to the charges filed in federal court, Prince was a suspect in the armed robbery of three men on a CTA train in September 2021.
After following the usage of a Ventra card stolen during the robbery, police arrested Prince on Sept. 12, 2021, on a CTA train platform in the 200 block of South State Street. He was allegedly carrying a loaded 9 mm Smith and Wesson handgun as well as a fully loaded magazine, cocaine and the victim’s Ventra card.
He was originally charged in Cook County with aggravated unlawful use of a weapon by a felon, but those charges were dropped by state prosecutors after the federal indictment was filed last year, records show.
Prince’s criminal history includes three other armed robbery convictions as well as 2014 conviction for aggravated battery to a police officer, court records show.
The federal public defender who had been representing Prince could not immediately be reached Tuesday.
A spokesman for acting U.S. Attorney Morris “Sonny” Pasqual declined to comment.
Prince’s federal case was among more than 600 similar cases filed by the U.S. attorney’s office over the past five years where investigations by Chicago police and other local law enforcement are later removed to U.S. District Court.
At least 50 people have been charged in 2023 alone with violating the felon-with-firearm ban, court records show.
The reasons to charge a defendant in federal court vary, but prosecutors generally promote it as a tool to get the city’s most violent, repeat offenders off the street instead of putting them back into the Cook County justice system.
The potential penalties also are typically much tougher. Not only does the federal charge of unlawful possession of a weapon by a felon carry a maximum 10-year prison sentence, defendants must serve 85% of their sentence, instead of being eligible for day-for-day credit in the state system.
If a defendant, such as Prince, has previously been convicted of three or more violent felonies, federal prosecutors can seek an enhanced, mandatory minimum sentence of 15 years behind bars, or up to life.
Tribune wire services contributed.
jmeisner@chicagotribune.com
