I’m splitting this off from one of the news threads b/c I think this subject deserves it’s own thread.
Can anyone fill me in on what happened at the Matt Hoover / CRS Firearms trial?
Yes, I know that he had allegedly run afoul of the law with the product that he had endorsed and I know from the post in the News thread that he was convicted on 5 of 8 charges, but I don’t really know the details of the charges other than that he got charged with machinegun transfers, conspiracy, and financial structuring charges.
Can anyone tell me how they managed to convict him on 5 charges but not the other 3? I tried watching the trial on YT but there weren’t enough hours in the day for me to keep up with it.
It came down to the Jury Instructed to Deliberate on whether or not Hoover and Ervin sold or handle the cards (transfer of prohibited, unlicensed, nontransferrable machineguns), and whether or not Hoover encouraged people to help funding with Ervin’s Defense, as well as his own (Conspiracy). NOT whether or not the cards were Machine Guns - the ATF had already “established” that immutable and undeniable factoid by bureaucratic fiat…
Rufus - Acting classes – Yeah, I saw that – they were trained in how to testify to get a jury to believe them. Well, to be honest, all lawyers rehearse their witnesses so well that you shouldn’t expect anything less than an Oscar level performance – especially from whichever side has the biggest witness training budget.
AirHawk, do you have a link to the actual jury instructions? I’m pretty sure that that “drawings are actually MG” premise is something that has to be proven beyond a reasonable doubt, unless there is an agreed stipulation to that fact by the defense, or the judge directed the jury that the cards were indeed MG and the jury had a duty to convict if they believed the transfer of items had taken place. ATF claiming they are readily convertible is not good enough. The jury has to buy the ATF position.
If there were such an instruction that the cards were MGs, then indeed the jury would only have to determine that the transfers had taken place.
In the absence of such an instruction, then it comes down to whose expert witness the jury is willing to believe. Of course, things become skewed heavily when government employees testify – because some people sitting on juries inherently trust the government and automatically trust whatever it’s representatives say; and when only one side gets to present expert testimony that limits the opponent’s ability to present a complete theory of their case. That could amount to be reversible error on the part of the judge, but no Federa lCourt of Appeals likes to reverse a judge’s discretion on weapons charges.
It’s a problem when people who have no technical expertise with firearms are asked to sit on a jury. they can be easily fooled and manipulated.
Does anyone know if any of CRS Firearms YT videos were played before the jury? If so think they would likely cause more harm than good.
They stated repeated violations, when he mentioned the sponsorship. They would have had to at least show that portion of the videos if it was not conceded by the defense. Correct?
Correct? I can’t say. I don’t know much of anything about the facts of case. I started the thread to learn about them.
I doubt that the defense would stipulate to anything that the prosecution stated, and would make them prove everything – but I don’t know about that. I also don’t know if the prosecution used MH’s videos and I’d rather not make assumptions about that either.
I was thinking the prosecutors would just use bank records to prove their case if supporting someone’s legal defense amounts to conspiracy. I don’t know enough to understand how they were able to justify that conspiracy charge to the jury. To me it seemed to involve some pretty significant hand-waving.
What I can say is that when I viewed his videos – as a gun owner – I thought that MH was going to have a credibility problem with his jury b/c everything he has ever published on YT can and would be used against him. He does not come across well on his videos to non-gun owners. There seems to be a large number of non-gun owners who would look at his videos and label him as a criminal type, gun nut, crazy man, etc., irrespective of whether he is innocent or not. He just doesn’t present well. He made many anti-government rants that would not go over well with many people. Those videos pose the risk that he would be perceived as a crazy gun zealot. That would not help in his defense. At times he was definitely pushing the limits of what he thought he could get away with. I thought all of his comments about MG conversion details were ill-advised and likely to land him in hot water.
I’ve had to roll my eyes a few times when watching his videos. I had thought that he was going to get himself into trouble. I thought he would have been better off not to post videos on YT.
Which is why I felt they may be inclined to stipulate. Not making assumptions just supposing / guessingvwhat a non-gun owning group of jurors would think.
What I thought was more significant was that they had to modify the rifle itself to get it to work with the alleged part that was supposedly, in and of itself, an MG and was independently capable of turning a rifle into an “MG”.
The prosecution relies upon inexperienced people believing whatever they are told. In this case the jury seems to have believed that the card itself would magically turn any AR15 into an MG.
What is odd is that the facts seem to show that wasn’t the case at all, and that even the experts at the ATF couldn’t get the cards to work, so the experts in the Technical Branch modified the rifle itself to assist in the process of converting a semi-auto into an MG.
If I were on the jury I would have to weigh the claims of “readily convertible” by an the average person vs. “eventually convertible” by an expert in the Technical Branch of the BATF. Those aren’t even close to being the same thing. But some people lack technical expertise to see through invalid arguments and those people are get purposefully selected to sit on juries because they are naive and easy to influence.
The “jury of your peers” thing is an empty promise, a myth. If your case involves any level of specialized expertise you can count on them making sure that nobody sits on the jury who has anything more than the average level of knowledge on the subject.
Our entire system of justice is based upon composing a jury that is as full of non-expert people as possible so that they are easily influenced. If the jury selection process were ever to draw an expert for service, they use the voir dire questions to expose them as such and the attorneys use their privilege to object to them and strike them from serving.
I’ve been disqualified from jury duty for having too much education.
ok, i’ve not heard anything of this until now, so please enlighten me… what are the"cards" that they were calling machine guns? and after reading yalls post i think that the raising money thing was kinda a bs charge but what do i know.
That wasn’t a jab, just an attempt at humor trying to show some respect. I’ve seen a little thin-skinned stuff kinda bubbling up around here lately. Not pointed at you either.
I’m not the right guy to ask about “the cards” because I have no familiarity with them.
I’ve never looked at one, or how they are used to do their thing, but if I had to guess I’d say that it’s a piece of junk that’s put inside of an AR15 to interfere with the normal operation of the trigger to cause it to malfunction so that it fires more than one round per trigger pull, either by causing the gun to slam-fire or by interfering with the operation of the disconnector.
To come up with a better guess at how it works I would have to have someone tell me whether the linkage, when registered prior to May 1986, was supposed to be used with an AR15 or M16 bolt carrier and trigger components.
The problem with figuring out the method of operation is that studying the problem involves eating the Forbidden Fruit from the Tree of Knowledge. It doesn’t matter WHY you want to know these things, it has been determined that this knowledge is forbidden, and people who talk about or spread such knowledge get prosecuted for conspiring to build MGs.
The big mistake that MH made in his videos was openly professing that he could tell people how to build MGs, because that wasn’t the same thing as violating the NFA by building an MG. From the beginning I expected that attitude would bring him trouble.
There’s a youtube video that came out today about the “forbidden knowledge” aspect of studying the mechanics of the device, which the author equates to Orwellian thoughtcrime.
oh i gotcha, its a card with designs for the old lightning Link on them… yeah thats a No No. i too have not a single iota of interest in having one, dont own one, nor do i ever wish to have one. I do thnak you for educating me on what it was he was convicted for regarding those though. Thank you for sharing the information to make the articles make sense to me
