Lawyer wants gun charge tossed

Josey1

Lawyer wants gun charge tossed William Kaempffer, Register Staff March 22, 2002 John Lutters, 43, is charged with carrying a pistol without a permit in the slaying of Travis Hazelwood, 38, in Fair Haven. State prosecutors ruled he acted in self-defense and did not charge him with murder. Wednesday, his attorney, Robert M. Berke, asked Judge Lubbie Harper Jr. to throw out the lone weapon charge, arguing it doesn't apply in the June 15, 2001, shooting.The judge made no immediate ruling.After the hearing adjourned, Lutters, who is free on bail, spoke publicly for the first time about the ordeal. He recounted how Hazelwood has the blade "in my neck" when he fired the fatal shot. He said he had to make the choice of kill or be killed a day before his son's first birthday."I decided to come home to see my son turn one year old," he said.He also defended the need to carry a gun while he was driving his cab into what was characterized as some of the most dangerous neighborhoods in the city. In the last year, he noted, two cabbies have been killed in Connecticut in apparent robberies."When I'm out around home, I don't carry a gun around," said Lutters, a Seymour resident. "But I'll tell you one thing. I don't get into my cab without it."During the hearing, the attorneys didn't debate whether Lutters had a license to carry the weapon used in the killing. He didn't.But Berke argued that pistol permit statute itself gave him legal authority to carry the gun in the taxi.State law in Connecticut requires anyone possessing a firearm to have a state-issued permit, which requires a background check and certification from a licensed firearms instructor.But the law makes two exceptions, where people don't need permits to have guns in their homes or a business in which they have "proprietary interest.""One can argue reasonably and persuasively that the cab is a place of business," Harper noted during the court hearing.Therefore, Berke claimed, Lutters was exempt from needing the pistol permit since he leased the cab, giving him proprietary interest, and did business out of it.Assistant State's Attorney Jack Doyle, meanwhile, argued that the exception should only apply to fixed storefronts, not a cab that travels throughout the city. In response, Harper noted that statute was "clear and unambiguous" and that the cab seems to fit the criteria.To be certain, however, neither prosecution nor defense had any strong precedent to bandy. There is no previous court ruling to help interpret the law and no legislators in court to explain the intent of the 80-year-old law.During his argument, Doyle noted that there is a second state statute that makes it illegal to carry a handgun in a car without a permit. The state didn't charge Lutters with that.Doyle cautioned of a "slippery slope that this court would be going down" if it granted motion to dismiss."If we make an exception in this case, then we open the door." What about a pizza delivery guy, the Avon lady or Fuller Brush man, he asked."What do we do about an ice cream truck driver?" Doyle said.Berke, however, countered that most of those cases are different. A delivery van isn't a place of business, he said, it's merely a means to deliver merchandise from the storefront. A taxi driver, in contrast, conducts business in the cab, he argued.Harper said he would issue a written decision and recessed the hearing until May 15, calling the question "complicated to say the least."In 2001, Lutters was working for Metro Taxi when Hazelwood allegedly pressed a pair of scissors into his neck in a robbery. Hazelwood began cutting Lutters' throat when Lutters grabbed his gun and shot Hazelwood. Lutters pushed Hazelwood from the vehicle and drove off, calling police several hours later. http://www.zwire.com/site/news.cfm?newsid=3623652&BRD=1281&PAG=461&dept_id=7576

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William Kaempffer can be reached at wkaempffer@nhregister.com , or 789-5727.