Legal News

Judge Weinstein in NYC?s Gun Suit: I Don?t Want a Media Show Here

By Dan Slater

NYC’s lawsuit against gun retailers in the south has been billed as a David v. Goliath match between Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Jay Wallace, the owner of a sporting goods store in Georgia. According to the NYT’s coverage of the upcoming federal trial — to be heard by the oft-overturned district court judge, Jack Weinstein — Wallace, 51, is a man of “limited funds” who’s been sued by NYC and “its billionaire mayor.” But yesterday, reports the NYT, Judge Weinstein sidelined Goliath, announcing in a pre-trial hearing that Bloomberg, whom the city hoped would testify, could not take the stand.

“I’m not going to permit the case to turn into a media show on either side,” Weinstein reportedly told a city lawyer, Kenneth Taber, in court yesterday. “I see no reason to have the mayor here. From the city’s point of view, he doesn’t add anything to your case.” Taber had been telling the judge that Bloomberg was planning to testify about attending the funerals of police officers and comforting grieving widows.

“If we were trying a Guantánamo incarceration, I certainly wouldn’t allow anybody to call the president,” Weinstein reportedly responded. “I don’t see any reason for the mayor to be here.”

Here’s what NYC and its lawyers, led by City Corporation Counsel Michael Cardozo, are claiming: Wallace knowingly sold guns to out-of-state purchasers, and those guns eventually found their way to NYC, where they caused a public nuisance. To make the purchases, reports the NYT, the city hired an investigative agency, the James Mintz Group, which then sent undercover buyers to five states where they claim that they bought weapons in illegal “straw purchases” — those in which one person submits to a background check for a gun to be used by someone else.

Last month, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals overturned Weinstein in a different, but thematically-related gun suit against manufacturers for allegedly facilitating the movement of legally distributed handguns into illegal markets. In that case, Weinstein denied the manufacturers’ motion to dismiss, but was overturned by the appellate court, which held that the 2005 Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act barred the suit.

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on May 23, 2008 (boomark / email).