United States: Gun Suit Redux: Federal Court Allows Evidentiary Use of Firearms Database On Finding That What Congress Says Now Does Not Affect What Plaintiffs Obtained Then

Judge Weinstein parses tenses to find support for the City of New York’s public nuisance-based lawsuit against gun makers in Beretta.

As previously reported, see In Re Products Liability at 9 (April 2006), late last year Congress included a budgetary rider in an appropriations bill (the "2006 Rider") that seemingly prohibited a federal database (maintained by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, or ATF) used to track the purchase and sale of firearms from being introduced as evidence in civil liability cases. More specifically, the 2006 Rider provides that the contents of the database "shall be immune from legal process . . ., shall be inadmissi>le in evidence, and shall not be used, relied on, or disclosed in any manner, nor shall testimony or other evidence be permitted based upon such data, in any civil action pending on or filed after the effective date of this Act." Id. at *3. Before this development, New York City had already obtained the portions of the database it needed to prove its case, in discovery from the ATF.

Following passage of the 2006 Rider, the court issued an order for the parties "to show cause why the City’s suit should not be dismissed on the basis of the 2006 Rider, which is read by the defendants as excluding from evidence the ATF trace data in the hands of the parties." Id. at *1.

On April 27, 2006, following intervention by the United States, and a hearing, Judge Weinstein ruled that New York City could use the database information already in its possession to support its case, but could not obtain any new information. In support of his decision, he carefully framed the issue’s context -- stressing that the 2006 Rider was enacted as part of an ATFrelated appropriations bill imposing "a series of restrictions on the future use of those appropriated funds" by the agency, and that every paragraph, including the one immunizing the ATF database from any evidentiary use,"deals with the expenditure of federal monies." Id. at *5 (emphasis added).¹ From this position, he reasoned that since the 2006 Rider’s evidentiary restrictions "ha[ve] no application to data that is not to be disclosed through the use of federally appropriated funds," id. at *7 (emphasis added), they "are not designed to be applied to, and cannot be read to apply to, the trace data already disclosed to the parties and sought to be admitted in this case," id. at *8.

Recognizing, however, that there was "substantial ground for disagreement about" the applicability of the 2006 Rider, Judge Weinstein issued a stay to accommodate interlocutory appeal under 28 U.S.C. § 1292(b). Id. at *11.

Endnote

^{1 The 2006 Rider begins,“[N]o funds appropriated under this or any other Act . . . may be used to disclose part or all of the contents of the Firearms Trace System database maintained by the National Trace Center of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives . . . ” Id. at *3 (emphasis added).}

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