For a place that's supposedly "gun-free", police sure do discover a lot of guns being carried in the Chicago Transit Authority system. A federal judge in Chicago recently accepted a plea deal offered by prosecutors to a 10-time felon who was caught with a gun on a Blue Line train last July, and despite Gerald Pittman's lengthy criminal history he walked away with a sentence that's less than 1/3rd the maximum penalty.
Pittman was supposed to be under court supervision after a previous guilty plea involving drug trafficking, but he had stopped complying with the terms of his release months earlier when police spotted him on the train. The felon might as well have been waving a bright red flat reading "Look at Me", since he was allegedly drinking a beer and smoking in the train car. To complete the "things not allowed on public transportation" trifecta, Pittman had a loaded revolver in a red grocery bag when he was taken into custody.
“Defendant did not possess a gun in a private residence; he was carrying it in a shopping bag while riding on the L, where gun violence has risen at an alarming rate in recent years,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Michael Maione wrote in a sentencing memorandum. “Gun-wielding riders like the defendant have caused an increasing share of Chicagoans to fear for their lives when riding Chicago’s public train system.”
Maione asked Harjani to impose the maximum recommended guidelines sentence of 41 months, pointing to Pittman’s extensive criminal history, which includes 10 felony convictions. In one of those cases, Pittman allegedly admitted to selling a half-ounce of crack every single day between 2004 and 2008.
But Pittman’s attorney, Joshua Kutnick, urged the judge to impose a far shorter sentence, arguing that Pittman’s life history and conduct since his release from prison in 2018 showed meaningful rehabilitation. Kutnick additionally argued that Pittman had endured conditions at the Cook County Jail that were “meaningfully harsher” than he would have experienced at a federal facility.
It's wild to me that even with ten previous felony convictions, the guidelines called for a maximum sentence of less than 3 1/2 years in federal prison. While Pittman's attorney wasn't successful in getting a far shorter sentence, Harjani did cut Pittman a bit of break. CWB Chicago reports the judge game him two years on the felon in possession of a firearm charge, and another six months for violating his supervised release in the previous drug trafficking case.
As the U.S. Attorney pointed out, violent crime, including crimes committed with a firearm, has become increasingly common on CTA property in recent years, despite its status as a "sensitive place" under Illinois law. Though a federal judge rule the ban on lawful carrying violated the Second Amendment rights of four riders who sued over the prohibition, the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals reversed that decision and the Supreme Court declined to take up the case when the plaintiffs appealed earlier this year.
That decision by SCOTUS means the Chicago Transit Authority will be off-limits to lawful carry for the foreseeable future. It's pretty clear that prohibition isn't stopping career criminals and violent predators from bringing guns onto CTA buses and trains, but it's doing a bang-up job of ensuring that lawful gun owners who depend on the CTA to get around can't protect themselves from violent assaults before, during, or after their bus or train ride.
Editor’s Note: The radical Left will stop at nothing to enact their radical gun control agenda and strip us of our Second Amendment rights.
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