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A man who attempted to use Indiana’s 2022 permitless carry law to defeat his carrying-without-a-license conviction failed to find relief at the Court of Appeals of Indiana, which agreed with the trial court that the 2022 law is not remedial or retroactive.
In 2021, Emmett Lawrence was charged with Class A misdemeanor carrying a handgun without a license under Indiana Code § 35-47-2-1. About a year later, on July 1, 2022, the Indiana General Assembly amended the statute to allow for permitless carry.
Lawrence’s case was pending at the time, and he was later convicted by a Marion Superior Court judge. His counsel asked for the new statute to be taken into consideration at sentencing, and the trial court ultimately sentenced him to 180 days, with eights days executed and 172 days suspended to nonreporting probation.
On appeal, Lawrence argued that the 2022 amendment to the statute was remedial and therefore applies retroactively to him.
But the appellate court disagreed.
“The amendment was not intended to cure a defect in the statute,” Judge Nancy Vaidik wrote Wednesday in Emmett Lawrence v. State of Indiana, 23A-CR-6.
The Court of Appeals compared Lawrence’s case to two Indiana Supreme Court decisions: N.G. v. State, 148 N.E.3d 971 (Ind. 2020), and Martin v. State, 774 N.E.2d 43 (Ind. 2002).
N.G. involved an expungement petition for a felony conviction that had been reduced to a misdemeanor. The relevant statute required N.G. to wait five years before seeking expungement, but it wasn’t clear when that five-year period began.
The trial court denied the expungement petition, and while the appeal was pending, the Legislature amended the statute “to alleviate the confusion and made the change effective immediately.”
“Under the updated version, N.G.’s expungement petition would have been granted,” Vaidik wrote. “Our Supreme Court held that the amendment was remedial because ‘it cured a mischief that existed in the prior statute, namely, confusion on when the waiting period begins for certain ex-offenders seeking expungement.’”
Martin involved the question of whether the defendant could receive credit for time served on home detention as a condition of his probation. The relevant statutes did not address that question, and there was a conflict of authority.
As in N.G., Martin’s appeal was still pending when the Legislature revised the statutes to “explicitly provide probationers with home-detention credit.”
Contrasting Lawrence’s case with those decisions, the COA held, “The (permitless carry) amendment did not clear up any confusion in a statute, like in N.G., or address silence in a statute, like in Martin. And Lawrence doesn’t cite a single case to support his argument that the 2022 amendment is remedial.”
Judges Paul Mathias and Rudolph Pyle concurred.
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