Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier just did something almost unheard of — he told an appeals court that his own state got a conviction wrong because it violated the Second Amendment.
The case involves Christopher Morgan, who was convicted in Pennsylvania back in 2007 for carrying a firearm without a state license. Not a violent crime. Not a drug offense. Not a crime against another person. He was carrying a gun without a piece of paper saying he could.
Fifteen years later, Morgan was stopped by a Florida officer. He voluntarily told the officer he had a pistol in his center console. Florida charged him with possession of a firearm by a convicted felon under Florida Statute 790.23. His defense moved to have the charge thrown out as unconstitutional, both on its face and as applied to Morgan specifically. The trial court denied the motion. Morgan pleaded no contest, was sentenced to two days in jail and court costs, and appealed.
That’s where things get interesting.
Last week, AG Uthmeier filed a response to Morgan’s appeal that stopped the proceedings dead in their tracks — because he agreed with the defendant.
“On studied reflection, the Attorney General has concluded that the conviction does indeed infringe Morgan’s right, as a nondangerous felon, to keep and bear arms. The state must therefore confess error and urge this Court to reverse.”
Read that again. The state’s chief law enforcement officer told the court: we were wrong to convict this man.
Uthmeier grounded his position in his oath of office, writing that “it is thus the Attorney General’s duty to admit when he believes the State has obtained a conviction in violation of the Constitution.”
If allowed to file a brief, his office intends to argue the historical record — specifically, “the lack of historical evidence supporting the dispossession of all felons as distinct from the strong historical evidence supporting the dispossession of dangerous felons.”
That’s the crux of the post-Bruen felon-in-possession debate that’s been percolating through federal courts. The blanket federal prohibition under 18 U.S.C. § 922(g)(1) has taken some serious hits since the Supreme Court’s Bruen decision required gun regulations to be rooted in the historical tradition of firearms regulation at the Founding. Courts have increasingly been asked: did the Founders really intend to permanently strip non-violent offenders of their gun rights forever? The historical record suggests the answer is no.
This Isn’t Uthmeier’s First Rodeo
Florida’s AG has been stacking up Second Amendment wins. Earlier this year, he intervened in a case involving a young defendant to ask a state appeals court to uphold the right to carry for 18-to-20-year-olds — challenging a 1987 Florida law that banned concealed carry for adults under 21.
In September, when Florida’s First District Court of Appeals struck down the state’s open carry ban in McDaniels v. State of Florida, Uthmeier didn’t sit on his hands waiting for further litigation. He went straight to X and issued guidance to prosecutors and law enforcement statewide:
“Because no other appellate court has considered the constitutionality of Florida’s open carry ban since the SCOTUS decision in Bruen, the 1st DCA’s decision is binding on all Florida’s trial courts. Meaning that as of last week, open carry is the law of the state.”
That’s the kind of decisive, constitutionally grounded leadership that gun rights advocates have been waiting to see from state AGs for decades.
Uthmeier came up through the DeSantis administration — deputy general counsel in 2019, general counsel a year later, chief of staff the year after that. When DeSantis tapped then-AG Ashley Moody to fill Marco Rubio’s Senate seat, he appointed Uthmeier as the state’s 30th Attorney General. By all appearances, it was a good pick for gun owners.
What Comes Next
Eric Friday, general counsel for Florida Carry, Inc. and a pro-gun attorney in the state for over 20 years, called Uthmeier “the most intellectually honest Attorney General we’ve ever had in Florida.”
But Friday also flagged the practical problem that’s going to follow a ruling in Morgan’s favor: what happens to the thousands of Floridians with non-violent felony convictions who want to know if they can legally own a firearm again?
“The real question going forward will be a process for people who want a determination of whether their prior conviction is still problematic,” Friday said.
Florida’s clemency process — currently the only path to firearms rights restoration for felons in the state — has been backlogged and broken for years. Many states have a judicial restoration process. Florida doesn’t.
“New York has a better restoration process for felons to be able to bear arms than Florida,” Friday noted — which is a pretty damning statement about the state of things.
The Bottom Line
The courts have been slowly dismantling the legal fiction that a blanket prohibition on all felons owning firearms is constitutionally sound. Bruen opened the door. Cases like Morgan’s are walking through it.
What makes Florida’s situation notable is that the state’s own chief legal officer isn’t fighting this — he’s leading the charge. That’s rare. And it matters.
The question of what to do with the people who’ve been living under unconstitutional restrictions for years is a harder one. But you can’t solve a problem you won’t acknowledge. Uthmeier acknowledged it.
Story originally reported by Lee Williams for the Second Amendment Foundation’s Investigative Journalism Project.
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