The 44-year-old Sulphur Springs man struggled with drug addiction and deteriorating mental health and as a result had exhibited some recent erratic behavior, court records say.
Payne was arrested in late 2019 and pleaded guilty to a rarely used federal charge: possession of a firearm by an unlawful user of a controlled substance.
The death toll from gun violence, including mass shootings, continues to rise, as does the threat of domestic terrorism.
Federal prosecutors are left with the nation’s drug laws as a key tool to keep guns out of the wrong hands.
A previous drug conviction is not necessary, just ample evidence of ongoing drug use such as recent arrests, positive drug screens or an admission of drug use to police.
He said it appeared that prosecutors were using it in response to “behavior altered by drug use.” He said his client had posted photos of himself with guns on social media but never threatened to shoot anyone.
He said Payne has undergone drug treatment since his arrest and is clean and doing well for the first time in a long while.
But as Texas inches toward expanding medical marijuana use, a move that would bring it in line with three dozen other states, there is some concern that legal gun owners who use the leafy drug to treat their painful conditions could become collateral damage.
Texas’ medical marijuana program allows those with certain medical conditions such as terminal cancer, epilepsy and multiple sclerosis to have access to cannabis with a low level of THC through a prescription.
Fazio said much more dangerous, mind-altering and addictive substances are available by prescription, such as opioid painkillers.
People targeted under the law typically have either no criminal history or a minor one.
Federal agents, for example, believed that Gabriel Roberts was addicted to methamphetamine and was manufacturing synthetic Oxycodone and Xanax using a “pill press” at his Royse City home.
The search also “yielded evidence of drug use and drug manufacturing,” court records say, such as a scale, a blow torch, syringes and a pipe.
They said a “large quantity” of the drug was seized from him, as were guns.
It’s also illegal under federal law for people to own guns if they’ve ever been committed to a mental institution or been convicted of a domestic violence offense.
The Brady Act, which requires background checks, makes it a crime for “unlawful” drug users or addicts to own guns even if they’ve never been violent or in trouble with the law.
He called it a “scary thought” that otherwise legal gun owners who post photos of themselves using marijuana on social media could be prosecuted for it in federal court.
Official numbers are not kept, but Dru Stevenson, a law professor at South Texas College of Law-Houston, said about 200 people are prosecuted each year in the U.S.
It’s more common for the charge to be added to an indictment to “ratchet up” the possible sentence and put pressure on defendants to accept a plea deal, Stevenson said.
Archibald, 29, who is linked to the boogaloo boys anti-government extremist movement, was indicted last year on three drug counts as well as a single count of being an unlawful drug user in possession of a firearm.
Prosecutors say he posted threats online during the May 2020 social justice protests, telling people to “go shoot pigs.” Archibald also posted a video telling others to travel to Minnesota and “bring heat” and use “guerilla warfare,” according to prosecutors.
Aiden Bruce-Umbaugh, 23, was a member of AtomWaffen Division, a neo-Nazi hate group, officials said.
Bruce-Umbaugh, dressed in tactical gear, had been pulled over by police in 2019 while driving outside Lubbock.
But federal appellate courts so far have upheld the convictions, including one that cited a “well-established link between chronic drug use and violence” in its opinion issued last year.
Stevenson, an expert in regulatory law who wrote a paper last year on drug use and firearms, said the cases that have gone to trial typically involved people who used to be drug users but got clean.
Courts have interpreted that to mean drug use must be “reasonably contemporaneous” to the gun possession, he said.
The idea behind the law, he said, is that guns are dangerous and regular drug users are not always lucid and in control of their faculties, making it a potentially deadly mix.
And to avoid the conflict, some states have passed laws prohibiting officials from sharing data on approved medical marijuana users with law enforcement.
You could be in the wrong place at the wrong time, he said — for instance, if a friend gave you a joint and you were carrying a gun.
Joshua Blake Hulsman, 28, had no convictions on his record.
Hulsman has suffered from bipolar disorder for about 12 years and has had several “manic episodes” requiring him to undergo inpatient treatment, court records say.
Around that time, police found him “dancing in the street and blocking traffic,” court records show.
Kevin has worked for The Dallas Morning News since 2003, and he has covered federal criminal courts for the past six years.