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Five-year gun sentence stands after New Hampshire shooting
Judges said Garrito Fort was not facing an immediate danger when he armed himself and went outside. The ruling also leaves the federal felon-in-possession law unchanged in this case.
A federal appeals court kept Garrito Fort’s 60-month sentence in place after a New Hampshire family dispute turned deadly. Fort had pleaded guilty in federal court to possessing a firearm and ammunition as a convicted felon, then tried to undo the conviction by arguing that he was justified in arming himself and that the gun ban was unconstitutional as applied to him.
The First Circuit was not persuaded. The panel said Fort brought a pistol to an altercation with his girlfriend’s family and a family friend on Nov. 1, 2021, and that the encounter ended with the family friend dead and the girlfriend’s uncle seriously injured.
A narrow escape hatch that stayed closed
Fort’s main argument was that the law should recognize a justification defense, the narrow common-law doctrine that can excuse illegal conduct when someone faces an immediate threat and has no reasonable alternative. But the judges said he did not meet that standard.
The court said he armed himself before any present danger had materialized, while he was still inside the house. That timing mattered. A justification defense is meant for emergencies, not for someone who chooses to bring a gun into a confrontation and then later points to the violence that followed.
That logic also doomed his separate constitutional attack. Fort argued that the Second Amendment should protect his possession in these circumstances, but the court said the same facts that defeated the justification claim also left no room to strike down the federal felon-in-possession statute as applied to him.
Why the sentence stayed too
The panel also rejected Fort’s challenge to his 60-month sentence as substantively unreasonable. So the conviction stands, the sentence stands, and the court left the legal door narrow for defendants who try to turn a deadly confrontation into a firearms-defense case.
For people facing federal gun charges after a violent episode, the ruling is a reminder that necessity claims have to fit a very tight frame. Once a defendant brings the weapon into the fight, the story gets much harder to sell as self-protection under federal law.