| | |  Editorials | Issues | March 2009 
Prosecutors Seek Appeal in Dismissal of US Gun Case
 James C. McKinley Jr. - New York Times
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Related: see US is Arms Bazaar for Mexican Cartels
Houston — Prosecutors in Arizona scrambled on Thursday to figure out how to appeal a state judge’s decision to dismiss charges against a gun dealer who had been accused of arming a Mexican drug cartel.
“We believe it was an error, and we are going to do everything we can in the system to correct that error,” the state’s attorney general, Terry Goddard, said in an interview Thursday. “It’s not over by any means.”
The judge’s decision underscores how difficult it is in the United States to convict a gun dealer of wrongdoing in connection with the illegal flow of weapons to Mexico.
With its lenient gun laws and large number of dealers, Arizona is one of the biggest sources of weapons for the drug cartels, which killed 6,000 people in Mexico last year. More than 500 guns recovered by the police in Mexico in 2008 were traced to sellers in the state.
The dealer against whom the charges were dismissed, George Iknadosian, 47, of Glendale, Ariz., had been accused of knowingly selling about 700 weapons through intermediaries to two smugglers, who then shipped them to a drug cartel in the Mexican state of Sinaloa.
Several of the weapons have been recovered in Mexico after shootouts with the police, notably one gunfight last year in which eight officers died in Culiacán, the Sinaloa capital. Federal agents say the smugglers, who have pleaded guilty to lesser charges, recruited at least seven people with clean records as straw purchasers to buy the guns on their behalf, paying them $100 a gun.
But after a week of trial, Judge Robert L. Gottsfield of Maricopa County Superior Court on Wednesday threw out the charges against Mr. Iknadosian, saying no fraud had been committed.
Judge Gottsfield determined that even though the straw buyers had made false statements on federal forms claiming they were buying for themselves, they were legally eligible to buy the weapons, so the deception did not amount to a “material falsification” under state law.
He also asserted that federal gun laws require prosecutors to prove not just that someone lied to a gun dealer to obtain a weapon for someone else, but also that the person who ended up with the gun could not legally buy one.
“There is no proof whatsoever that any prohibited possessor ended up with the firearms,” the judge said in his decision, recorded in the court’s minutes.
Prosecutors said the decision appeared to ignore the heart of their case: testimony from several witnesses, including straw purchasers, indicating Mr. Iknadosian was part of a conspiracy that funneled weapons to Mexican assassins.
The decision was a setback for Mr. Goddard, who has tried to crack down on gun smuggling over the last year, stepping into a role usually played by the United States Attorney’s Office, which is bogged down with immigration cases.
Mr. Goddard said he was searching for a way to appeal the ruling, even though in Arizona such “directed verdicts,” in which a judge rules there is not enough evidence to support charges, are hard to reverse.
“We don’t really understand what the judge did,” he said. “We are trying to make sense of it.”
Federal agents say they have documented that over the two years leading to his arrest last May, Mr. Iknadosian sold hundreds of weapons of the kind currently sought by drug dealers in Mexico.
Scores of rifles were sold to seven Arizona residents who had been recruited by two brothers, Hugo Miguel Gamez, 26, and Cesar Bojorguez Gamez, 27, according to federal investigative reports. Federal agents say the two in turn smuggled the weapons to the Beltrán Leyva cartel in Mexico. |
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