TALLAHASSEE (CBSMiami/NSF) – An appeals court Friday declined to ask the Florida Supreme Court to take up a potentially far-reaching case about concealed weapons licensing.
The 1st District Court of Appeal, in a 12-3 decision, rejected a request from the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services to take a step known as certifying a “question of great public importance” to the Supreme Court.
The request came after the Tallahassee-based appeals court in June ruled that the department, which oversees concealed weapons licensing, improperly denied a license for a Florida resident who said his civil rights were restored after a 1969 conviction in Illinois.
The ruling said the department should not have relied only on a check of a federal database known as the National Instant Criminal Background Check System, of NICS.
A check of that system flagged the man’s decades-old felony conviction on a charge of stealing an eight-track tape player, leading to the department denying a license.
Judge Susan Kelsey, however, wrote a dissenting opinion in June that said the Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services did not have authority under state law to go beyond a process that involves working with the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, which has access to the federal database.
Kelsey and Judges Scott Makar and Ross Bilbrey dissented from Friday’s decision against certifying the case to the Supreme Court. Makar pointed to the potentially far-reaching implications of the June ruling.
“What’s changed — obviously — is a monumental and destabilizing shift in the long-standing interpretation of Florida’s firearms law as applied to those with felony records: the Department (of Agriculture and Consumer Services) can no longer rely — as it has for decades in safely administering the concealed weapons statute — on the most critical source of criminal justice information available to law enforcement officials at FDLE in reviewing the concealed weapon applications of those with felony records,” Makar wrote Friday.
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