A roundup of some of the most popular but completely untrue stories and visuals of the week. None of these are legit, even though they were shared widely on social media. The Associated Press checked them out. Here are the facts:
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Hunter Biden’s gun charge isn’t the same as those previously faced by Lil Wayne, Kodak Black
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.
THE FACTS: Biden entered into a plea agreement on tax charges in a deal that would allow him to potentially avert the gun charge. He was 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 crimes carry the same maximum sentence under federal law, but legal experts note that the two rappers’ prior criminal records would have factored into their sentences whereas Biden is a first time offender. Social media users are comparing the cases to argue that Hunter Biden was given a pass for his most recent legal transgressions. “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.” 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. Biden, on the other hand, is a first time offender; he was charged with possessing a handgun for 11 days in 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. 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. 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. 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. Still, 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.