They're going back to prison, but they didn't commit new crimes... A court battle over an obscure Tennessee statute freed these men from prison. Years later, they were told they must return.
2000x.jpg
After 10 years in prison, Michael Lemons was released in 2017 and returned to his hometown of Jackson, Tennessee. He got a job at a steel mill, reconnected with his now-adult daughter and bought his first new car. “I did better at 45 than I've ever done in my entire life,” Lemons said. But three years later, in September 2020, he had to report back to federal prison in Morgantown, West Virginia. He hadn’t broken any rules or committed another crime.
Lemons was one of about 20 men who had been sent home from prison, only to be locked up again — all because of a court fight over whether they should be considered “armed career criminals.”
1200x.jpg
In his 30s, Lemons bought a hunting rifle from a neighbor, despite several burglary convictions when he was a teenager. Federal law says you can’t own a gun if you’ve ever been convicted of a felony. Authorities found the rifle while searching his home on an old warrant dating back to his time on probation in his early 20s. All of Lemons’s burglaries were committed in the course of a single year more than a decade earlier, when he was homeless. He had not been in any trouble with the law since. Still, under a 1984 federal law, he was considered an “armed career criminal.”
People convicted of being a “felon in possession of a firearm” spend about five years in prison, on average. But the 1984 law requires an automatic 15-year sentence if someone with a record of three or more violent felonies gets caught with a gun. In the years since, the Supreme Court has struggled to define violent crime in the context of the Armed Career Criminal Act.
McClurg.jpg
This is the story: https://www.themarshallproject.org/2...mit-new-crimes