Steffon Josey-Davis

The Garden State's draconian firearms regulations have ensnared another innocent person — but he may beat the rap.

On September 20, 2013, a 22-year-old private security guard named Steffon Josey-Davis was unloading his service pistol in his car when his six-year-old sister suddenly entered the garage. Hoping to avoid alarming her, Josey-Davis stopped what he was doing, placed his gun quietly into the glove box, and, having been "distracted by a chain of events," quickly forgot all about it. Later that evening, while out for a drive with his girlfriend, he was pulled over for a minor traffic offense, at which point he volunteered to the officer that he had a loaded firearm in the front of the car, in violation of New Jersey's transportation rules. The pistol was confiscated, and, when he went to pick it up later in the week, he was arrested and charged with illegal possession — a second-degree felony.

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Of all the states in all the country, Steffon Josey-Davis had to screw up in this one.

Whatever his intentions might have been, there is no question that Josey-Davis broke the law. In a recent interview with Fox News, he noted rather hopefully that his concealed-carry permit "was due to be approved the week he was arrested." Perhaps this is true, and he would have received it shortly after. But it is also utterly irrelevant. If one needs a permit to carry a concealed weapon, one needs a permit to carry a concealed weapon. If one lacks that permit, one is in violation of the law. Steffon Josey-Davis was in violation of the law.

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#related#And yet a couple of factors complicate the story somewhat. The first is that, at the time of his arrest, New Jersey was experimenting with a firearms amnesty that explicitly applied to the very provisions of which Josey-Davis was eventually found guilty. Evan Nappen, the prolific firearms attorney who has now taken charge of Josey-Davis's appeal, holds that his client should never have been detained in the first place. "He shouldn't be in this situation," Nappen says over the phone. "The amnesty was in force."

Nappen has a point. Not only is the plain language of the law on his side, but he has a solid legal precedent to point to as well. In State of New Jersey v. Onn Rapeika, decided in January of this year, Judge James J. Guida dismissed a series of firearms-related indictments that had been leveled against a drug dealer because an "amnesty program (P.L. 2013, c.117) passed by the Legislature . . . was in effect at the time" when the police found his guns. "Armed with statutory construction and the synopsis that the law provides a 'window' to dispose of certain unlawfully possessed firearms," Guida wrote, "the only logical conclusion to be reached is that defendant cannot be prosecuted for possession." "The plain reading of the statute," he added, "indicates defendant had until February 4, 2014 to exercise one of the disposal options authorized." And yet the "firearms were seized on January 3, 2014," a month before the deadline.

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That amnesty program went into effect on August 8, 2013. Steffon Josey-Davis was stopped on September 20. The obvious question, then: If Onn Rapeika is covered by its protections, why is Josey-Davis not?

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Indeed, if the appeals court agrees with Nappen's logic, Josey-Davis may well find himself freed by the perverse breadth of the very rules that were used to prosecute him. Unlike most states, New Jersey does not have a law on the books that explicitly prohibits carrying a firearm without a permit; instead, the state requires anybody who is discovered in possession of a firearm to demonstrate either that he has a concealed-carry permit or that he is exempt from prosecution under one of the few legal exemptions that the state has reluctantly carved out in Title 2c:39–6 of its Code of Criminal Justice. Or, put another way, rather than presuming that its citizens may do anything with their firearms that has not been explicitly prohibited, New Jersey presumes that all gun owners are guilty of illegal possession unless they — or their temporary behaviors — are exempted from the law. The practical upshot of this is that if a gun owner cannot prove that he is exempt from prosecution, he is deemed by default to be in illegal possession — regardless of whether he has purchased his firearms legally (which Josey-Davis did), or whether he intended to commit a crime (which Josey-Davis did not).

This being so, Nappen's amnesty claim makes a great deal of sense. Subsection b of Section 2C: