Chautauqua County District Attorney Patrick Swanson
MAYVILLE – Chautauqua County’s District Attorney says his office has never enforced a provision in the New York SAFE Act that was recently found to be unconstitutional.
County DA Patrick Swanson sent out a statement regarding the seven-round provision of the SAFE Act, which limits the number of rounds an individual can keep in a firearm to just 7 or less.
Swanson says that in 2013, a federal court in the Western District of New York indicated that that provision was unconstitutional. The decision was appealed, and in 2015 the Second Circuit Court of Appeals upheld that decision.
As a result, Swanson says that since he became the Acting District Attorney in 2016 he has not prosecuted anyone under the section deemed unconstitutional.
Swanson said he was issuing the statement after the DAs from both Erie County and Niagara County had publicly stated they were not going to prosecute anyone under the provision, leading to calls to his office asking if he would also follow the same policy.
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