(The Center Square) – A Nebraska man who faced a similar federal criminal charge to Hunter Biden was handed a two-year prison sentence last week.
Davonte Brown, 24, of Lincoln, Nebraska, got 24 months in prison from Senior United States District Court Judge John M. Gerrard for “being an unlawful user of controlled substances who possessed a firearm,” according to a press release from the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Nebraska. He also got two years of supervised release following his prison sentence.
The sentence came after Brown pleaded guilty to the charge in June.
Brown got the sentence after posting Snapchats of himself possessing a rifle. During this time, he also unlawfully used marijuana; law enforcement found evidence that he possessed marijuana between July 2018 and May 2020.
The case is similar to what Hunter Biden, son of President Joe Biden, is currently going through. Last month, the younger Biden was indicted in a Delaware federal court on three counts tied to possessing a gun while using drugs. Two of the counts allege that he lied on a form saying he was not an illegal drug user when he bought a Colt Cobra 38SPL revolver in October 2018. The other says he allegedly possessed a firearm while using illegal drugs, as The Center Square previously reported.
Hunter Biden is pleading not guilty to these charges despite unsuccessfully attempting to reach a plea deal with prosecutors in July.
Legacy media outlets like The New York Times and NBC News have reported that people going to prison on such gun charges is rare, despite people like Brown going to prison for them.
“The federal gun charge, which makes it unlawful for a drug addict to possess a weapon, is a rarely used statute that is facing legal challenges and has recently been used as a catch-all charge against white supremacists,” NBC News wrote in June 2023.
The New York Times alleged that Hunter Biden is being held to an unfair standard because of his last name.
“When officials with the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives reviewed Hunter Biden’s gun application several years ago, they believed the case most likely would have been dropped if the target were a lesser-known person — because the gun had not been used in a crime and Mr. Biden had taken steps to get and stay sober, according to a former law enforcement official familiar with the situation,” the newspaper wrote.
