![]() ![]() Taylor, a Virginia woman who was a marijuana user, faced the charge after her 6-year-old son took the gun to school and shot a teacher with it in January. While the Taylor case and the Biden case involve the same crime of being a drug user or addict in possession of a firearm, there is an obvious gulf between the two cases: Taylor’s gun was used to shoot somebody, Biden’s gun was not. “Two-tier justice,” Biggs tweeted Thursday. Andy Biggs of Arizona, also raised the Taylor case to support his contention that Hunter Biden is benefiting from a double standard. What happened to equal justice under the law?” Meanwhile, the same DOJ is sending Deja Taylor to prison for 18-24 months for the exact same offense. Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee tweeted Wednesday: “Biden’s DOJ is giving Hunter a sweetheart deal for lying on a firearm background check. Here is a more detailed look at the distinctions between the Biden case and both the Taylor case and Kodak Black case. But “that is a different problem,” he said, “than if prosecutors were dropping charges as a political favor for a president.” He said he would not be surprised if “defendants who can afford expensive lawyers” were shown to be more likely to receive pretrial diversion than a low-income defendant who struggles to afford a lawyer at all. ![]() Stevenson emphasized that he is not arguing that the justice system produces equal outcomes for all defendants. He said, “I honestly have never seen a single case where law enforcement went looking for someone solely because they thought they were a drug user with a gun.” “In nearly all the cases involving this charge, the defendant was caught in a drug bust OR an incident of drug-related violence, so they are usually charged with other things as well,” Stevenson said. The federal charge of being a drug user or addict in possession of a firearm usually comes up only as part of investigations into more serious drug or gun crimes, such as probes into shootings, drug trafficking and gang activity. And the majority of situations in which a drug user owns a gun are never even investigated, let alone charged. Pretrial diversion, Stevenson said, is regularly used for “minor” gun crimes like a possession charge not connected to a shooting. First-time offenders like Biden generally receive more lenient treatment than repeat offenders in plea negotiations and sentencing.Īn expert on the gun offense Biden was charged with, South Texas College of Law Houston professor Dru Stevenson, said in an email on Thursday: “It is NOT accurate to say that in this case they were making a special exception as a favor to a powerful elected official.” There’s no sign that Biden’s gun had a role in other crimes.Īnd the rapper, unlike Biden, had a substantial conviction record when he committed the federal offense of falsely denying on two gun background check forms that he was under felony indictment, with a history of arrests on charges related to guns, drugs and violence. Prosecutors said two of the rapper’s guns were found at crime scenes, including the site of an attempted shooting. Kodak Black’s case involved three purchased guns and the attempted purchase of another, compared to one gun in Biden’s case. Biden’s gun has no known connection to any shooting. Taylor’s gun was used in a shooting (committed by her young child). But a review of the facts around the Taylor case and the Kodak Black case shows that both of them have major differences from the Biden case, in which the Trump-appointed prosecutor, David Weiss, agreed to pretrial diversion. Some prominent Republicans in Congress have pointed to the gun cases of Virginia mother Deja Taylor, who is likely to go to prison, and the rapper known as Kodak Black, who did serve time in prison, as evidence of a double standard for Hunter Biden. Some of them have focused on how the prosecutor who negotiated the deal, an appointee of President Donald Trump, agreed not only to endorse a sentence of probation on two misdemeanor tax crimes to which Biden pleaded guilty but to also permit the president’s son to avoid a conviction on a felony charge of being a drug user or addict in possession of a firearm. Many Republicans have criticized Hunter Biden’s plea deal. ![]()
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