Could This Be Bruen's Biggest Victory Yet?
The case, Commonwealth v. Dean F. Donnell, heard in Lowell District Court, revolves around a New Hampshire man who was arrested and prosecuted for carrying a firearm in Massachusetts without a permit from that state. In an interesting twist, the defendant’s attorneys argued that Massachusetts law requiring a permit to carry “is unconstitutional on its face, is unconstitutional as applied to the defendant, and violated the defendant’s right to be free from cruel and unusual punishment.”
“The conduct of the defendant in the instant case clearly is covered by the Second Amendment,” Judge Coffee wrote. On the second point, he later concluded, “The Commonwealth points to no historical precedent limiting the reach of one’s exercise to a federal constitutional right only within that resident’s state borders.”
“A law-abiding resident of New Hampshire who is exercising his constitutional right should not become a felon by exercising that right while he is traveling through Massachusetts merely because he has not obtained a Massachusetts license to carry, which now, under the holding of Bruen, has to be issued to an applicant unless the applicant is otherwise disqualified,” the judge wrote. “The court can think of no other constitutional right which a person loses simply by traveling beyond his home state’s border into another state continuing to exercise that right and instantaneously becomes a felon subject to a mandatory minimum sentence of incarceration.”
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