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  • 2015-10-06 (xsd:date)
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  • Did President Obama Plea Bargain Gun Trafficker Dontray Mills? (en)
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  • In September 2015, social media interest escalated in the outcome of a firearms-related court case involving a man named Dontray Mills: Mills, then 24 years old, was arrested in April 2014 after the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) investigated his involvement in multiple firearms transactions between 2012 and 2014: News accounts referenced straw purchases, a practice wherein individuals who wish to purchase firearms but are unwilling or unable to legally do so obtain them secondhand by having other parties by the weapons on their behalf. The court case involving Mills attracted little attention before the 19 August 2015 publication of a Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel article titled Judge Repeats Gun Rights Slogan During Sentencing for Illegal Buys: According to the meme shown above, Mills' plea bargain was negotiated by the Department of Justice (or in some versions, the Obama administration or President Obama himself). However, Mills' sentence was seemingly light because he pleaded guilty to only one of the numerous charges against him, and the choice of giving Mills probation rather than jail time was not the result of instructions from the Justice Department (or higher) but rather the personal discretion of Judge Rudolph Randa (who was appointed as a federal district judge by President George H.W. Bush and has a history of making controversial decisions), based on his view of Mills' contrition and likelihood of re-offending: As is often the case, Dontray Mills remained largely out of the news after he was sentenced, with no additional reporting revealing any details of the plea bargain under which he was sentenced to probation. Although the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Wisconsin represents the federal government in criminal cases such as the one involving Mills, it's merely one of 94 district courts that try cases (and agree to plea bargains) each day in the United States. By all credible accounts, Mills' plea was a relatively small affair granted by a judge sympathetic to his acceptance of responsibility and non-criminal ambitions, not a function of some furtive agenda by President Obama working through the Justice Department to go easy on illegal gun traffickers. (en)
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