Patrick "Tate" Adamiak did nothing wrong. He was convicted of having all kinds of nasty weapons, including a rocket launcher, but when you look at the actual evidence, it's a travesty that he was convicted of anything.
His appeal didn't quite work out like he hoped, either. He got a small win, but not the win he needed.
That means that as the appeals process is forced to continue, his last hope isn't a courtroom or a judge. It's his attorney, as Lee Williams talked about earlier this week.
Attorney Matthew Larosiere has experience defending those accused of violating nonsensical gun laws and is known as a fighter within the country’s tight Second Amendment legal community.
Larosiere understands exactly what Patrick “Tate” Adamiak is facing legally, but he’s never seen anything like it.
“There are three categories of charges, and each one is more insane than the last one,” Larosiere said Monday. “What Tate’s case shows you is that it doesn’t matter what you have, they can still charge you.”
Adamiak was sentenced to 20 years, which boiled down to two 10-year sentences served consecutively, because of two different charges. Yet his previous appeal found that the earlier court erred by convicting him of both sets of charges because it amounted to double jeopardy.
Yet they kept the 20-year sentence, even though that was based on the two sets of charges, as Laorsiere pointed out.
“The strangest thing is that the government argued before the Fouth Circuit that his sentence shouldn’t change at all, because they were so unfamiliar with the case,” Larosiere said. “The only reason he got 20 years was because the same crime was 10 years and 10 years consecutive. Everything else was concurrent, which made no sense.
“The judge was 100-percent buying everything the state was selling,” he said.
As a result, Adamiak will now receive a new sentencing hearing, which could cut his time spent behind bars by at least 10 years.
“But we’re going to try to argue away from inclusion of all of these guns,” he said. “At a new hearing, we should at least be able to try. All of the items they calculated were non-NFA firearms. I don’t understand how totally legal guns were calculated. We do get to argue that again.”
For those unfamiliar with Adamiak's case, the short version is that he had some parts, some replicas, some perfectly legal guns, and some demilled stuff. The ATF arrested him and claimed the replica Sten was a working machine gun, but it only "worked" when they modified the crap out of i,t and even then, they couldn't get it to fire more than one round at a time because their modification to the magazine jammed in so badly it couldn't automatically reload.
The supposed rocket launcher, which the ATF claimed he was selling in a press release, was a demilled RPG. Had he tried to fire it, it would have blown up in his face because it had holes drilled in the tube. It wasn't a functional weapon at all.
He was also jammed up over some semi-auto MAC-10s, which are perfectly legal and highly collectible.
If Laorsiere is successful in arguing against their inclusion, it should do a good bit to right the ship on Petty Officer Adamiak's life. He wants to go back into the Navy and become a SEAL, which is the pathway he was on before all of this happened.
And the ATF needs to be slapped down hard for what they did to him.
The truth of the matter is that if the ATF can do something like this to one of us, they can do it to any of us, and that's downright terrifying.
