Federal Appeals Court Reinstates Lawsuit Over Seized Firearms

It’s not unusual for firearms to be seized during the course of a criminal investigation. But when the gun owner doesn’t face any criminal charges, their collection should be returned to them. Two men in Michigan, however, say the Saginaw County Sheriff has been holding on to 14 guns that were taken by deputies back in 2017, and they’ve sued to get their firearms back. 

A U.S. District Court judge threw out the lawsuit filed by Gerald Novak and Adam Wenzel against Sherif William Federspiel, but this week a three-judge panel of the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals reinstated portions of the lawsuit, including the claim that the sheriff violated Novak and Wenzel’s Second Amendment rights. 

In their ruling, the judges note that neither Novak or Wenzel were ever charged in the domestic violence investigation that led to the seizure of their guns. Instead, Novack’s nephew Benjamin Heinrich, admitted he took one of the firearms in question from the bedroom of his uncle’s cabin and aimed it at the mother of his child in order to force her out of the residence. Heinrich pleaded guilty in state court and completed a year of probation, but the fourteen guns seized by the Saginaw County Sheriff’s Office are still in Federspiel’s possession. 

Among the arguments deployed by Novak and Wenzel in their lawsuit is the claim that the sheriff violated their right to keep and bear arms. The district court judge ruled that the Second Amendment did not apply because Federspiel “had not interfered with Novak’s or Wenzel’s ability to buy or own other guns; an argument the Sixth Circuit panel wholeheartedly rejected. 

But that reasoning has neither any limiting principle nor any basis in the caselaw; to the contrary, it conflates Bruen’s two steps into one. 

The right to keep or bear one’s own firearms is quintessentially conduct that falls within the text of the Second  Amendment. The relevant questions here, rather, are twofold. First, whether these plaintiffs in fact owned these guns. And second, if so, whether Federspiel’s possession  of them has been “consistent with the Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.”

Michigan doesn’t require the registration of firearms, though handgun sales are supposed to be documented through a “pistol sales record” that’s submitted to the state police. Novak and Wenzel say they don’t have any paperwork proving that the guns in question belong to them, but the fact that Novak owns the cabin where the guns were stored is pretty strong evidence that he’s telling the truth about who the guns belonged to. 

So long as the two men can provide some proof that the guns belong to them, I’d say they’ve got a strong case against the sheriff. The national tradition of gun ownership in the United States doesn’t support the idea that law enforcement can hang on indefinitely to firearms seized as part of a criminal investigation. Heinrich’s case has been over and resolved for years now, but the guns found at the scene of his crime are still under lock and key at the sheriff’s office.