Appeals Court Upholds Sailor’s Convictions for Unregistered NFA Items

The Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals didn’t take long to issue its opinion in Patrick “Tate” Adamiak’s appeal of his convictions for receiving and possessing an unregistered firearm, possessing and transferring a machinegun, and three counts ofreceiving and possessing an unregistered destructive device; all of which earned the sailor a 20-year federal prison sentence. 

As Second Amendment Foundation investigative reporter Lee Williams has detailed, Adamiak never should have been prosecuted to begin with, given that the unregistered weapons Adamiak was accused of possessing were either inert and inoperable or parts unregulated by the ATF. 

All of the counts against him were almost laughable. None made any legal sense.

• Counts 1 and 2 concerned the PPSh-41 receiver, which is not a firearm under current federal law.
• Counts 3 and 4 concerned his M203 and M79, which are Title 1 firearms that were legally transferred by an FFL. Neither had a 40mm barrel affixed. Adamiak had 37mm barrels for both, which are legal and not subject to National Firearms Act (NFA) regulation.
• Count 5 concerned two inert RPGs, which were missing all of the parts to make them functional and had holes drilled directly into their chambers.

“My lawyers said that they were almost happy that I was charged with these RPGs because it was so ridiculous that it would damage the ATF’s creditability and made the jury question their logic,” Adamiak said. “Unfortunately, the ATF decided to take my inert RPGs to their lab, completely rebuild them with components off one of their own real RPGs and demonstrate that they would work by shooting a .30 caliber training round in a self-contained firing mechanism. They essentially inserted a bolt-action rifle into the tube that looks like a rocket, fired one shot, and then said it’s a destructive device.”

Throughout the trial, the ATF’s attorneys showed jurors pictures of Adamiak’s extensive personal collection, including random parts, barrel shrouds and MAC-10 flats.

“They told the jury these were all machineguns,” he said. “The worst was the M240. They displayed a photo of the ATF case agent holding the belt-fed M240 replica and testified that it was a machinegun, and also made filings saying the same thing, despite the fact that the ATF’s own report says it’s a replica and not a firearm at all.”

Despite that, Adamiak was convicted by a jury and sentenced to 20 years in federal prison. Today, a three judge panel on the Fourth Circuit largely upheld that conviction, though it did rule that one of the charges must be dropped due to double jeopardy. 

Fourth Circuit just released their opinion in Adamiak. They agreed with our double jeopardy argument, but the rest of the case was per curiam and they engaged in no analysis whatsoever. Most frustratingly, they point to Bianchi saying the court didn’t need to do a 2A analysis.…

— Fudd Busters (@FuddBusters) October 14, 2025

The opinion itself is very brief, as Adamiak attorney’s Matthew Larosierie noted on X. In response to his Second Amendment argument, for instance, the panel noted only that it was “squarely foreclosed by this court’s holdings in Bianchi v. Brown and United States v. Hunt.” 

Adamiak could still ask the entire Fourth Circuit to hear his appeal, as well as file a cert petition with the Supreme Court. The quickest way for Adamiak to be released from prison, though, would be a pardon by President Donald Trump. 

It is beyond disappointing that the Fourth Circuit panel didn’t step in and correct the injustice that was done at the trial court level. As a result, Patrick Adamiak remains behind bars for crimes he didn’t commit. I would love for Adamiak to find relief within the judicial system, but given the uncertainty of that outcome I’d also like to see Second Amendment organizations can coalesce behind an appeal to the president to grant Adamiak a full pardon and restore him to freedom. 

Editor’s Note: The Schumer Shutdown is here. Rather than put the American people first, Chuck Schumer and the radical Democrats forced a government shutdown for healthcare for illegals. They own this.

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