The Senate Judiciary Committee is hearing a bill Monday that would require the police to return stolen firearms to their rightful owner once they are no longer needed for "evidentiary purposes." SB 350 would also require the police to auction off contraband firearms every six months rather than destroy them, and would prohibit agency employees from bidding on the firearms or profiting from their sale. Before auctioning any firearms, however, the police in custody of the weapon would be required to use their "best efforts" to locate the rightful owner.
This bill appears to be a genuine effort to make sure that the innocent victims of crime are not further victimized by the seizure and destruction of their stolen firearms, and it is a good step in the right direction.
There are problems with the bill, however. As noted above, SB 350 would permit retention of the firearms until "such firearm is no longer needed for evidentiary purposes." This language needs to be tightened. While there might be some evidentiary value in retaining a firearm for testing by forensics experts when the firearm is used to shoot another person and the marks on the barrel are matched to the fired bullet, there is absolutely no evidentiary value to retaining a firearm that has merely been stolen. Such stolen firearms should be returned expeditiously to their owners without making them wait until a criminal's trial. Some prosecutors retain stolen firearms, however, because they wish to display the firearm to a jury for shock value. This practice by some prosecutors has the potential to deprive innocent owners of their property for long periods of time pending trial, and SB 350 would appear to write this abhorrent practice into the Georgia Code as statutory law.
A stolen firearm has a serial number, much like a VIN on an automobile. Once the serial number has been recorded, and it matches the stolen incident report, there are no further "evidentiary purposes" to retaining the firearm. A burglar's trial may not take place for years, thereby depriving the innocent owner of his firearms for years merely so that the prosecutor can display the firearm to the jury.
Can one imagine the uproar if a pending bill permitted the police and prosecutors to retain recovered stolen vehicles, depriving the owners of the use of them for several months or years while the car thief was awaiting trial? Should the innocent victims of a firearms theft be subject to less protection than the innocent victim of a car theft? The state and federal constitutions contain no express, fundamental right to "keep . . . motor vehicles." They do protect a fundament right to "keep . . . arms." SB 350 would write into law the practice of some anti-gun prosecutors, who keep the arms away from their innocent owners for no evidentiary purpose other than to display the arms to a jury at some point years down the road, hoping to hear them gasp in surprise.
Hopefully, some brave Senator on the judiciary committee will amend SB 350 to define what constitutes "evidentiary purposes," so as to prevent the retention of firearms unless there is something about the firearm that needs to be proven, such as that it is actually a firearm, or that it did indeed fire the bullet that was recovered from a body. No anti-gun prosecutor should be permitted to retain an innocent victim's property merely for purposes of displaying a firearm to a jury. The powerful lobbying group NRA is backing this bill, and it is unknown whether they will tolerate any amendments without threatening Senators on this committee, as the NRA has done repeatedly in the past.
Let's hope that the Georgia General Assembly will at least place constitutionally protected firearms on the same footing with stolen cars.
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