| On July 24, 2012, 18-year-old Alton McReynolds was arrested in Chicago, Illinois and charged with aggravated unlawful use of a firearm.
On August 21, 2012, McReynolds pled guilty in Cook County Circuit Court and was sentenced to one year in prison.
In September 2013, the Illinois Supreme Court ruled in People v. Aguilar that the portion of the statute under which McReynolds had been convicted was unconstitutional. The statute said that a person committed the offense of aggravated unlawful use of a weapon when a person “carries on or about his person or in any vehicle or concealed on or about his person except when on his land or in his abode or fixed place of business any pistol, revolver, stun gun or taser or other firearm and the firearm is uncased, loaded and immediately accessible.”
The court held that this portion of the statute violated the right to keep and bear arms as guaranteed by the Second Amendment.
In 2021, McReynolds’s attorney, Joel Flaxman, filed a motion to vacate the conviction based on the Aguilar ruling. After the motion was granted on February 24, 2021, McReynolds’s conviction on the gun charge was vacated, and the case was dismissed.
On February 3, 2022, Cook County Circuit Court Judge Erica Reddick granted McReynolds a certificate of innocence. McReynolds then filed a claim for compensation in the Illinois Court of Claims.
– Maurice Possley
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