Legal Question in Criminal Law in California

Re: jurisdiction

I want to add a couple of points to the answer I gave you yesterday.

There are two major types of jurisdiction which a court must have before it can hear a case. It must have personal jurisdiction over the parties and it must also have subject matter jurisdiction over the legal issues involved.

There are many types of cases that can only be heard in a state court, and there are others that can only be heard in a federal court. Many others, though, could be heard in either a state or a federal court. If I bring a lawsuit in a state court which could only have been heard in a federal court, the state court would have to dismiss the case for lack of subject-matter jurisdiction even if it had personal jurisdiction over the parties.

I don't know very much about gun control laws, but there may be types of guns which are subject to federal regulations that can only be litigated in a federal court. It is possible that your friend had such a gun when he was arrested and that he was prosecuted in a state court. If this is what happened, then the court would be unable to decide whether he violated the federal gun law. This is because the court lacked jurisdiction over the criminal charge and not because it lacked jurisdiction over the gun itself. If the federal law does not apply to bullets (and if possessing these particular bulltes is a crime), then the state court could decide whether he possessed them illegally. Here again, the question is whether the court has jurisdiction over the charge, not whether it has jurisdiction over the bullets.

There is a third type of jurisdiction for lawsuits which dispute the ownership of a particular item of property. This is called in rem jurisdiction. Courts have in rem jurisdiction over such a case if the disputed property is located within its state or district, even if the the court otherwise could not assert jurisdiction over any of the parties.

In rem claims usually involve real estate but they can involve any type of valuable object. Thus, if I happened to own a rare antique gun which I kept in a vault in Kansas, a New Yorker who believed she was entitled to the gun could sue me in a Kansas court even though I live in California. In that particular type of situation it makes sense to talk about "jurisdiction over the gun." My initial reply said that there was no such thing, but I was only thinking of the criminal context at the time. Jurisdiction over an object is never (or maybe almost never) an issue in a criminal case.

Re: jurisdiction

You have confused several different legal concepts. In order to convict someone for gun possession, the court only needs to have jurisdiction over the person and over the place where the event occurred. There is no such thing as jurisdiction over a small object like a gun, and if there were it would hinge on the gun's location at the time of the offense and not where it had been made.

The "fruit of the poisonous tree" doctrine has nothing to do with jurisdiction. It is the rule which requires evidence the police obtained illegally to be excluded from trial, along with any other evidence the police subsequently obtain as a result of the illegal search. Nothing you wrote suggests that your friend was illegally searched, so this rule probably has nothing to do with his case.

I can think of several possible reasons why the government "couldn't convict him on the gun". The most likely explanation is that the type of gun he had was legal but that the bullets were not (armor-piercing bullets are illegal in some states even though they are compatible with legal guns). It is also possible that the prosecutor made a mistake and did not prove an element of the alleged crime. Or maybe the jurors just voted to acquit because they didn't believe that charge had been adequately proven.

Since you did not say what charges your friend faced or what evidence was offered against him, I can't say whether he has any strong arguments to make or what type of arguments they might be.