A federal judge in Chicago has ruled the mother of a Black child in the city can’t continue a class action seeking to force the state to enact and enforce stricter regulations on gun sales.
Shanice Mathews, who lives in the city’s Garfield Park neighborhood, sued the state, Gov. JB Pritzker and the Illinois State Police on behalf of her son, alleging violations of the 2003 Illinois Civil Rights Act and the 1973 Rehabilitation Act. As part of the lawsuit, she wants the court to certify a class consisting of Black minors who do or have lived in Chicago, arguing their exposure to gun violence has either caused disabilities or increased the risk of becoming disabled.
Attorneys representing Mathews in the action included Thomas H. Geoghegan, Michael P. Persoon and Willem Bloom, of the firm of Despres, Schwartz & Geoghegan, of Chicago.
Thomas H. Geoghegan
| dsgchicago.com
She was also represented by attorneys Jonathan Lowy, Christa Nicols and Kelly Sampson, of the gun control activist group Brady Center for Gun Violence, of Washington, D.C.
In a ruling filed Sept. 5, U.S. District Judge Joan Gottschall dismissed the complaint, finding Mathews lacked standing to sue in light of a June 23 U.S. Supreme Court opinion, United States v. Texas.
Gottschall said the original complaint reaches to the preceding decade and included two other named plaintiffs, all of whom alleged their children had post-traumatic stress disorder linked to living in city neighborhoods “with a high rate of gun violence.”
Mathews is the only plaintiff who still lives in the city, and Gottschall detailed both the complaint’s procedural history as well as its allegations on “the harmful effects of gun violence on children living in Chicago” with data that covers nearly two decades
Mathews’ son specifically has lived in North Lawndale and Garfield Park. His mother alleged that in his three years in Garfield Park there have been at least 10 shootings within four blocks of his home. When the boy was 9 years old, his cousin was fatally shot in October 2018 while walking home from a high school football game. About six weeks later, another cousin died by suicide.
After detailing the way her son’s life has changed, Mathews alleged the ISP has “a mandate to issue regulations that would require (gun) dealers to implement business practices that (the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives) and the gun industry’s own trade association agree will curb the diversion of legal guns to the illegal market through theft, loss or straw sales.”
Gottschall said both Mathews and the state defendants devoted most of their supplemental briefings to U.S. v. Texas. She said that lawsuit, from both Texas and Louisiana, challenged prosecutorial guidelines from the Biden White House prioritizing arrest and deportation of noncitizens “who are suspected terrorists or dangerous criminals, or who have unlawfully entered the country only recently.”
Similar to Mathews’ allegations about a failure to fully enforce gun laws on the books in Illinois, the states said the administration’s policy violated a mandatory arrest requirement affecting any noncitizen. However, the Supreme Court determined its own precedent held a state doesn’t have standing to challenge the “Executive Branch’s exercise of enforcement discretion over whether to arrest or prosecute” without showing the state itself is a potential subject of such prosecution.
Gottschall detailed how Mathews’ current complaint argued a judge could force ISP to develop a plan to recover some 36,000 guns from 19,000 people whose Firearm Owner Identification cards have been revoked, but said doing so would force the court to determine which police money and staff resources would be devoted to such an effort and found that to be an imposition of the judicial branch on the executive’s function.
Mathews further agued an exception to Texas applies because she alleged the executive branch had abandoned its legal responsibilities in this arena. But Gottschall said the complaint “acknowledges that defendants provide training and impose licensure requirements,” and although Mathews alleged those measures are inadequate, they still exist and as such her complaint improperly asks the court itself to impose stronger requirements.
In one narrow sense, Gotschall said, Mathews did demonstrate standing: Her request for an injunction seeking a potential change to the state’s requirements for gun dealer license renewal.
However, she continued, to proceed with that claim she needed to show how adopting the business practices her complaint listed would “affect straw purchase rates and downstream gun violence in Chicago.”
Gottschall concluded by noting “all parties here accept what is common knowledge,” the city’s long-standing gun violence problem, which are “concentrated in predominately African-American Chicago communities. Children in these neighborhoods grow up hearing gunshots at night, fearing for their safety when they go out to play, and are traumatized by seeing relatives and friends killed on the streets.”
But Texas deprives Mathews of standing to force state officials to change how they enforce current laws and the complaint doesn’t have enough allegations to show the new policies Mathews requests would “appreciably abate the daily gun violence.”
Because Mathews’ third amended complaint was filed before the Texas ruling, Gottschall granted Mathews until Oct. 3 to file a fourth amended complaint. She denied the motion for class certification, but said it could be reinstated if federal standing requirements are met.