In search of justice

In Arizona, as in six other U.S. states, it is legal to carry
a concealed weapon without a permit—called concealed
carry—but if you have a prior felony, and get caught
with any kind of weapon, you will garner mandatory
prison time.
“In Home Depot, you can carry and no one really
cares,” says Jeffrey Heinrick JD’10, a senior attorney with
the Pinal County Public Defender’s Office in Florence,
Ariz. “At the same time, you never know who’s packing,
which is why when road rage happens in Phoenix, you
do not want to get into a confrontation with anyone on
the road, because you have no idea if someone will
shoot you.”
While guns may be easier to obtain and carry in
Arizona as opposed to other states, “At the same time, if
you’re not using a handgun correctly, commit a crime,
or have a prior felony, you will get annihilated,” Heinrick
says, and his office defends several such cases. “If you’re
not ‘doing it [guns]’ correctly, [Arizona has] zero problem
locking you up for as long as possible.”
Maldonado to join the New York City Police Department—
after leaving the Academy, he was assigned to a housing
precinct that encompassed some of Brooklyn’s most
violent housing projects. There, he became intimately
acquainted with guns and gun violence. “In the summertime,
there were shots fired all night,” says Maldonado,
now a second-year student at VLS. “You’d go up onto the
rooftops in public housing, and there’d be shell casings. It
was a very tough place.”
With the neighborhood awash in firearms, many of
them illegal, he often wondered, “'How can guns be coming
so easily in the hands of bad guys?' It was very sad
and nerve-wracking.”
New York City’s powers tried to address this very issue
a century prior. In 1911, in response to rising gang violence
and a heinous murder-suicide, the city passed the
Sullivan Act, one of the first and most restrictive guncontrol
laws in the country. The law, which still stands today,
requires a police-issued permit to carry a concealed
weapon within city limits. The permits are notoriously
“...You never know who’s packing, which is why
when road rage happens in Phoenix, you do
not want to get into a confrontation with
anyone on the road, because you have no idea
if someone will shoot you.”
Heinrick—who owns two guns, including a .38-caliber
snub nose Smith & Wesson he keeps in his car—
cites a recent case of a 60-something-year-old Pinal
County resident who, when out building fences on his
desert ranch, “carried an ancient rifle in the back of his
truck to ward off animals,” Heinrick says. When he was
pulled over for a road violation and the police ran his
criminal history, they discovered a felony from 1982,
and the man eventually had to serve time behind bars.
“He thought [the felony] had disappeared in the court
system, but they never forget your felony convictions.
He had a rifle, and so he had to get prison time. Every
once in a while you get those cases where you think,
‘this sucks.’”
Urban Warfare
On Sept. 11, 2001, Jose Maldonado Jr. JD’18 was a
teenager living in Westchester County, just north
of New York City. The events of 9-11 compelled
difficult to obtain from police, and visitors to New York
are sometimes arrested while carrying weapons that are
legal on their home turfs. Even so, gun violence remains
high in some New York neighborhoods.
Of the 200 arrests he made while on the force, Maldonado
had four illegal-gun “collars,” or felony arrests, including
one during his rookie year. When he or someone
in his department would run a seized gun’s serial number,
“99 percent of the time [the gun] was reported stolen.
You could see there was that pattern,” Maldonado says.
“I don’t think I ever heard of somebody that was arrested
with a firearm when it came back that he had a permit. A
lot of the people who have illegal guns are pretty bad news.”
Taking at least a few of those stolen guns off of the
street was gratifying for Maldonado. “There was that
feeling that if you took one off the street, you knew this
[illegal gun] wasn’t going to hurt anyone else—a mother,
a child, or another police officer.”
Of his decision to leave the NYPD and attend law
school, Maldonado says, “I had accomplished everything
13 WINTER 2016/2017