Supreme Court rules felons can sell, transfer guns

WASHINGTON, May 19 (UPI) -- The Supreme Court has ruled that convicted felons may be able to transfer their legally owned guns to someone else rather than surrender them to the government.

In siding with a former U.S. Border Patrol agent in Florida convicted on a drug charge, Justice Elena Kagan said authorities can transfer a felon's weapon to a trusted third party, as long as the court is convinced the felon won't use the weapons.

"A felon cannot evade the strictures of [the law] by arranging a sham transfer that leaves him in effective control of his guns," Kagan said in Monday's ruling.

In 2006, Tony Henderson was convicted of distributing marijuana and, as a condition of his release on bail, was ordered to turn over all his firearms. After pleading guilty, he was subject to the federal law barring convicted felons from possessing firearms.

Henderson said his weapons collection, which had been confiscated by the FBI, legally belonged to him and sought to sell them to a friend or transfer ownership to his wife. A lower court determined Henderson had "unclean hands" and was not allowed to profit from the sale, even though the weapons were not involved in a crime.

Kagan wrote Henderson could not "place those guns in a secure trust for distribution to his children after his death. He could not sell them to someone halfway around the world. He could not even donate them to a law enforcement agency." If the guns were involved in a crime, then the felon would lose the ability to transfer or sell them, Kagan wrote.

"It's a hands-down victory for the little guy," Henderson's attorney, Daniel Ortiz, told The Wall Street Journal. "In victimless crimes, it will allow people to better support their families and, in others, it will provide a way to better provide compensation to the victims themselves."

Also on Monday, the Supreme Court sided with two San Francisco police officers in the 2008 shooting of a mentally ill woman when she resisted being moved from a private room in a group home to a psychiatric facility. In siding with the police, the court ruled they were immune from claims they violated her Fourth Amendment rights when they entered the room. The court did not address the main issue in the case: whether the Americans with Disabilities Act applies in these kinds of confrontations.

The court also unanimously decided to tighten the rules for allowing federal prisoners to file lawsuits without paying filing fees and ruled that Maryland had violated the Constitution by collecting taxes for income earned in other states without giving a credit for taxes paid to those states.