Ray Rzeplinski looks back for a last arrival as holds the door for more than a dozen supporters entering a courtroom for his sentencing in the irregular “2A Ray” case in Hamilton County, Tenn. (Photo David Tulis)
CHATTANOOGA, Tenn., Friday, Oct. 4, 2024 – Ray Rzeplinski is given an eight-year suspended sentence on 55 felonies in an Aug. 2 conviction as felon in possession, with the prosecutor and judge seeming to realize the botch of a case can settle on mental health exams and occasional deputy intrusions serving justice, or at least a simulacrum of justice.
Judge Amanda Dunn, overseeing Hamilton County’s criminal court, settles on the minimum sentence, which for 54 of the 55 convictions is eight years. That, according to DA Coty Wamp’s assessment of punishment, is a matter of law.
The felony convictions could have brought 650 years in the state penitentiary. One conviction was for owning a short-barreled rifle sold Mr. Rzeplinski privately by a policeman. That charge carries a 2-year sentence max. The court threw out a resisting arrest charge arising from the afternoon in which a mob of Hamilton County deputies beat Mr. Rzeplinski to a pulp and put him into the ICU four days.
Attorney Ben McGowan, assigned the case on the public dole, argued for unsupervised probation, so probation officers will not have to “deal with somebody who doesn’t need to be dealt with,” Mr. Rzeplinski being a hardworking plumber who was running a mass excavator to make a field line 11 p.m. the night before.
After trial, Mr. McGowan refuses comment.
The excitement of supporters over the lenient sentence is tempered by problem underlying the case, that being its initial premise in 2019 that Mr. Rzeplinski has a felony record from a minor role in a 1997 Bradley County burglary.
The Hamilton County sheriff’s office seized 55 weapons and “more than a million rounds of ammunition,” investment assets held by 2nd amendment and pro-cop “2A Ray.” Mr. Rzeplnski’s retail purchase of most of the disputed weapons was greenlighted every time by retailers such as Academy Sports, whose clerks add F$10 to the purchase price to obtain clearance from TBI.
Repeated clearances for public purhase are affirmation of Mr. Rzeplinski’s lack of mens rea, or guilty mind, which Miss Wamp’s ADA Nicole Evans had to prove. Mr. McGowan let her get away with not having to prove it by failing to have Mr. Rzeplinski testify indiviually about each weapon and how be bought each weapon with a clear conscience, having obtained TBI approval and consent.
Not only does state of Tennessee baptize all his gun purchases, but it gives him the high honor of having been a concealed carry permit holder, meaning he may freely carry a concealed handgun with the permit being a defense against a bizarre criminal charge in Tennessee called “carrying with the intent to go armed.” Mr. Rzeplinski got a “concealed carry” permit from department of safety. The department renewed it after four years.
The state’s databases are centralized and intermixed, and there are no secrets on the other side of the veil, the state omniscient if not omnipotent. Yet because of errors in the state’s recordkeeping, with continuing state OKs of firearm sales, Mr. Rzeplinski built up his private armory, walking himself into a trap.
The trap was sprung when Mr. Rzeplinski made, as many people do, an effective “911 call from hell.” Prior to his arrest, he’d been asking the sheriff department’s help with thefts at Ray’s Plumbing, with shop in a rundown retail block in Middle Valley, that he viewed not just as torts, but crimes.
Detective Jason Maucere, agreeing to meet with him that day, had done a background check on Mr. Rzeplinski, whom he intended to assist, and found out about a felony plea agreement in the archives at the Bradley County court system. The day he was to have met Mr. Rzeplinski, the detective went to Bradley County to look at the court record to nail him as a felon.
“It was a very bad day and spiraled out of control very quickly,” says Judge Dunn, explaining why Mr. Rzeplinski’s uneasy temper, abrupt ways and insistent nature might call for mental health counselling, given circumstances of the case.
These felony records, Mr. Rzeplinski has always believed, had been for a misdemeanor, and expunged when a Chattanooga lawyer took his money and corresponded with the system regarding expungement.
On the day of deputies’ confronting Mr. Rzeplinski, Mr. Maucere got DOSHS to revoke the carry permit, and the sheriff’s department set up a confrontational scenario to arrest Mr. Rzeplinski, pretending that he was “barricaded” in his garage, which all evidence showed was side open at the instances in view.
Mr. Rzeplinski is criminally charged with knowing he was a felon while doing the prohibited act of buying and believing what he remembered from 1995, that he is no worse than a misdemeanant.
Reliance defense
Mr. McGowan does not believe in the reliance defense, because he did not trench it around the defendant. Had the defense been thoroughly made, it would have won acquittal. Reliance is when you rely on a government document or approval for your basis of action and state of mind. It defeats the charge in the indictment that Mr. Rzeplinski “knowingly and intentionally” bought weapons as a felon.
For example, you can defeat a willful failure to file prosecution on federal taxes by proving your state of mind as innocent of any knowledge of duty to pay or file federal tax returns because charge of “willful failure to file” is defeated by reliance on research material showing you weren’t liable to file or had no duty. That knowledge is established by getting professional reliance letters, as many people have, in which lawyers, accountants, tax practitioners, enrolled agents advise no liability statute exists for you as a man or woman wage earning, but only for fictive creatures called corporations that earn income.
“Go listen to the files,” says midstate bureau chief Christopher Sapp, “listen to the sentencing file. His attorney, the judge never told him that he was pleading to a felony, never told him he was charged with a felony.” The parties refer to offenses and crimes.
“That’s the reason Ray can honestly, truthfully stand before God and say he thought it was a misdemeanor because he never thought he had a felony because he was never told he had a felony. The only word that was used with him or in his presence was misdemeanor.”
“That is why he has no guilty conscience about any of this,” says Mr. Sapp, “nor should he.”
