Kramer Levin Files Amicus Brief for Everytown for Gun Safety in the New York State Court of Appeals

On July 12, 2018, Kramer Levin filed an Amicus Brief on behalf of Everytown for Gun Safety in the New York State Court of Appeals in an appeal in an important case involving gun trafficking, Williams v. Beemiller Inc.  Everytown is the nation’s largest gun violence prevention organization. It was founded in 2014 as the combined effort of Mayors Against Illegal Guns, a national, bipartisan coalition of mayors combating illegal guns and gun trafficking, and Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America, which was formed in the wake of the mass shooting at the elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut. Former Kramer Levin partner Eric Tirschwell is the Director of Litigation and National Enforcement Policy at Everytown. This is the second amicus brief we have filed for Everytown.

The Williams case addresses “straw sales” of handguns by a federally-licensed gun dealer in Ohio (defendant Charles Brown) to a New York gun trafficker (defendant James Nigel Bostic) who re-sold the guns in New York for profit. A “straw sale” is an illegal transaction in which a person prohibited from buying a gun from a licensed dealer (or who wants to conceal the purchase) enlists a second person to front as the purchaser and fill out the required paperwork. Straw sales are a major contributor to gun trafficking.  Data compiled by Everytown and other organizations shows that trafficked guns frequently cross state lines in a predictable geographic pattern: guns are trafficked from states with weak gun laws (like Ohio) and resold in states where it is harder to buy a gun (like New York). In this case, one of the handguns sold by Brown in Ohio, and trafficked by Bostic to New York, was used by a gang member in Buffalo to shoot and seriously injure a high school student, the plaintiff Daniel Williams, whom the shooter apparently mistook for a rival gang member.

The Appellate Division, Fourth Department reversed the trial court and held that the exercise of jurisdiction over Brown in New York would not comport with due process, because he did not “purposefully avail himself of the privilege of conducting activities within New York.” Everytown’s amicus brief explains the commercial and geographic realities of gun trafficking and straw selling and the existence of the Ohio-to-Buffalo trafficking pipeline. The brief argues that Brown is subject to jurisdiction here because Bostic functioned as Brown’s de facto New York distributor and Brown was, in reality, knowingly and purposefully distributing guns in New York.