High Court Strengthens States’ Powers in Gun-Related Crimes

People accused in multi-state crime sprees can be prosecuted in any of those states for using a gun, even if they had or used the gun in only one state, the Supreme Court ruled Tuesday.

The 7-2 decision reinstated the federal gun conviction and accompanying five-year prison sentence of a man also convicted of kidnapping and conspiracy for crimes stemming from a 1994 drug deal gone bad.

At issue was a federal law making it a crime to use or carry a gun “during and in relation to any crime of violence.” Conviction on the gun charge means an extra five years in prison.

Jacinto Rodriguez-Moreno and others kidnapped the middleman in a cocaine deal after someone else ran off with the drugs without paying for them. The kidnapped man, Ephrain Avendano, was taken from Houston to New Jersey, where his wife and children also were held captive.

Avendano later was taken to New York and then to Maryland, where prosecutors say Rodriguez-Moreno obtained a gun and threatened to kill him. Avendano escaped, and Maryland police subsequently arrested Rodriguez-Moreno and five accomplices.

Prosecuted in federal court in New Jersey, Rodriguez-Moreno was convicted and sentenced to 12 years and three months in prison, including five years for using a gun during a violent crime.

The U.S. 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals upheld some of his convictions but threw out the gun conviction and the five-year sentence it drew. The appeals court said he could not be prosecuted anywhere but Maryland on the gun charge.

The Constitution gives criminal defendants the right to be tried in the state and judicial district where their alleged crimes were committed, although courts are authorized to switch trial sites for fairness.

Writing for the Supreme Court on Tuesday, Justice Clarence Thomas said the appeals court was wrong because the underlying crime of kidnapping--an essential part of the gun crime--had occurred in four states.

“A kidnapping, once begun, does not end until the victim is free,” Thomas said. “It does not make sense then, to speak of it in discrete geographic fragments. . . . It does not matter that” Rodriguez-Moreno “used the .357 Magnum revolver . . . only in Maryland.”