Photo Credit: Associated Press
Jury Deliberations are set to resume Tuesday in Hunter Biden’s trial on gun charges. The jurors must decide whether he is guilty of federal firearms charges over a revolver he bought in 2018, when prosecutors say he was addicted to crack cocaine.
If convicted in the gun case, he faces up to 25 years in prison, though first-time offenders do not get anywhere near the maximum.
Hunter Biden’s lawyers have sought to show he was trying to turn his life around at the time of the gun purchase, having completed a rehabilitation program at the end of August 2018. The defense called three witnesses, including Hunter’s daughter Naomi, who told jurors that her father seemed be improving in the weeks before he bought the gun.
And the defense told jurors that no one actually witnessed Hunter Biden using drugs during the 11 days he had the gun before Beau’s widow, Hallie, found it in Hunter’s truck and threw it in a trash can.
Prosecutors spent last week using testimony from his ex-wife and former girlfriends, photos of Hunter Biden with drug paraphernalia and other tawdry evidence to make the case that he lied when he checked “no” on the form at the gun shop that asked whether he was “an unlawful user of, or addicted to” drugs.
“He knew he was using drugs. That’s what the evidence shows. And he knew he was addicted to drugs. That’s what the evidence shows,” prosecutor Leo Wise told jurors in his closing argument Monday.
The trial began last week in Delaware’s federal court, with prosecutors seeking to show that Hunter Biden was addicted and regularly using drugs during the 11-day period when he bought and owned the gun.
