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Comparing Hunter Biden’s case to charges faced by Lil Wayne and Kodak Black is “comparing apples to oranges,” one expert says
CLAIM: Hunter Biden is pleading guilty to the same gun charge as Lil Wayne and Kodak Black, but the two rappers faced prison sentences while the president’s son does not.
AP’S ASSESSMENT: False. Biden has reached a plea deal that would allow him to avert the gun charge. He was also charged with illegal possession of a firearm by a drug addict while Lil Wayne was charged with illegal possession of a firearm by a convicted felon and Kodak Black was charged with making false statements to purchase multiple firearms.
THE FACTS: Social media users are arguing that Hunter Biden was given a pass for his most recent legal transgressions because of his powerful political ties, citing the similarity in gun charges faced by two prominent rappers: Lil Wayne and Kodak Black.
“Feds wanted to send Lil Wayne to prison for 10 years for the same crime that Hunter Biden is getting a slap on the wrist for,” wrote one user on Twitter who shared a screenshot juxtaposing news headlines of the two separate cases.
“2 tiers of justice?” wrote Bradford Cohen, Kodak Black’s lawyer, in an Instagram post. “Kodak was charged for the same crime. Got over 3 years. Mr. Biden will not serve a day. Feels right?”
But while all three men faced felony gun charges, that’s where the similarities end, legal experts argue.
Federal prosecutors announced Tuesday that Biden had agreed to plead guilty to two misdemeanor counts of failing to pay federal income taxes. As part of the plea deal, the 53-year-old also agreed to complete a pretrial drug counseling program in exchange for prosecutors dropping a felony charge of illegally possessing a firearm as a drug user.
Meanwhile Lil Wayne, whose real name is Dwayne Michael Carter, pleaded guilty in 2020 to a federal charge that he unlawfully possessed a weapon despite being a convicted felon. The 38-year-old rapper admitted to possessing a .45 caliber, gold-plated handgun found in his luggage in 2019.
And Kodak Black, whose legal name is Bill Kapri, was sentenced to three years in prison for falsifying documents used to purchase weapons at a Miami gun store in 2019.
Former President Donald Trump granted Carter a full pardon just days before he was to be sentenced, and commuted Kapri’s sentence as part of a flurry of clemencies shortly before leaving office in January 2021.
“It’s really not a fair comparison, since plea deals turn on way more than the actual charge,” Bennett Capers, a former federal prosecutor who now heads the Center on Race, Law, and Justice at Fordham Law, wrote in an email. “A federal prosecutor looks at a person’s prior arrests, a person’s prior convictions, and also looks at what else the defendant can be charged with.”
Capers and other experts noted that Carter had already been sentenced to eight months in prison more than a decade prior for another felony gun charge. Convicted felons are barred under federal law from possessing firearms.
And Kapri’s lengthy rap sheet at the time of his 2019 arrest included a variety of felonies, including a one-year prison sentence in New York after being found with weapons and drugs at the U.S.-Canada border. His legal troubles haven’t abated, either: Kapri is currently awaiting trial on a charge of trafficking oxycodone.
Biden, on the other hand, is a first time offender. He was charged with possessing a handgun, a Colt Cobra .38 Special, for 11 days in October 2018 despite knowing he was a drug user.
“The comparison with Kodak Black’s case in Florida is a red herring,” Cheryl Bader, a former federal prosecutor who now runs the Criminal Defense Clinic at Fordham Law, wrote in an email.
Capers agreed: “Comparing Hunter to someone with a different criminal history and the target of a different criminal investigation will always be on par with comparing apples to oranges.”
Jeffrey Kirchmeier, professor at the City University of New York School of Law, acknowledged all three were technically charged under the same federal statute — 18 U.S.C. Sec. 922 — dealing with various firearms violations.
The difference, he explained in an email, is the subsection of the law each was charged.
Carter was charged under 18 U.S.C. Sec. 922(g)(1), while Hunter Biden was charged under 18 U.S.C. Sec. 922 (g)(3) and Kapri was charged under 18 U.S.C. Sec. 922 (a)(6).
Kirchmeier added that the three charges, while distinct, also carry the same maximum penalty, as do all violations under the federal firearms statute. But, like the other legal experts, he stressed the maximum penalty is just the highest punishment allowable under the law.
“Other factors would go into the actual sentence and what a prosecutor would recommend, including prior convictions,” Kirchmeier wrote.
The U.S. Attorney for Delaware’s office, which is prosecuting Biden, declined to comment while the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Florida, which prosecuted Carter and Kapri, didn’t respond to an email seeking comment.
But Kapri’s lawyer maintains the lack of prison time in Biden’s plea deal is “highly unusual,” even for a first time offender.
“In Kodak’s case, he was charged with lying on a form, essentially, the same thing Mr. Biden did,” Cohen argued in an email to The Associated Press. “Yet, they decided to charge him under a different subsection, thus lowering his potential exposure on the crime.”
Biden’s lawyer Christopher Clark, however, dismissed comparisons to either rapper’s crimes as “baseless” and “wildly misleading.”
In an email, he cited “the premise, the statutory basis, and the fundamental understanding of statutory maximum penalties as opposed to actual sentences, among other things,” but declined to elaborate further.
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