“I don’t want to lose any more people to Palm Beach,” Gov. Hochul said back in June. “We’ve lost enough.”
Hochul was talking taxes then, but the hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers who told pollsters last month they will “definitely” pack up and leave the city if Zohran Mamdani is elected mayor have plenty of other reasons to go.
Just ask Charles Foehner, the 67-year-old retired Queens doorman who in May 2023 defended himself with lethal force from an assailant with 15 prior arrests and a history of mental illness.
Foehner survived the middle-of-the-night altercation thanks to his trusty revolver in what everyone accepts is a case of self-defense.
Queens District Attorney Melinda Katz wasn’t through with Foehner, however.
Although she could not prosecute him for resisting his assailant, the mere fact Foehner bore firearms in New York exposed him to criminal charges serious enough to land him in jail for up to 25 years.
Compare that draconian outcome with reality in my state, Florida, where firearms can be carried openly and without a permit and crime is at an all-time low.
Only a year before Foehner’s incident, the Supreme Court struck down New York’s century-old gun-control law, ruling it unconstitutional for requiring “proper cause” for a gun license and mandating the state adopt a new law consistent with existing federal gun-control regulations.
That law, the Concealed Carry Improvement Act, has itself proved so restrictive that it’s faced multiple federal-court challenges.
With his back to the wall and facing serious financial difficulty — and as plenty of violent criminals with arm-long rap sheets freely walk the streets — Foehner took a plea bargain of four years in jail.
Judge Toni Cimino rejected Katz’s hateful demand that Foehner report for incarceration before the holidays, but prevailing legal practices will likely not allow the judge to reduce or suspend the prison term at Foehner’s formal sentencing hearing Jan. 14.
Unless Gov. Hochul acts quickly and grants clemency, Foehner’s next four Thanksgivings and Christmases will be spent behind bars, effectively as a political prisoner of a capricious anarcho-tyranny that prizes criminals over citizens.
To any sane person, Foehner is a hero.
Exercising his constitutional right to bear arms, an issue with which the state has noticeably struggled, he employed them in what even Katz appears to admit was a legal act of self-defense.
As a senior citizen with no prior criminal record, Foehner has never posed any risk to society and poses no risk to it now.
In fact, the opposite is true — society proved to be a risk to him, and he stands to suffer years in prison at an advanced age as its victim.
As Foehner’s attorney Thomas Kenniff, who successfully defended subway hero Daniel Penny in Manhattan last year, said after the plea-bargain hearing, his client deserves a plaque, not a prison sentence.
“For too long our political leaders have coddled violent criminals at the expense of innocent New Yorkers,” Kenniff wrote me. “We have witnessed self-defense put on trial, Good Samaritans mercilessly prosecuted for protecting others, and the Second Amendment rights of law-abiding New Yorkers, like Charlie Foehner, continually trampled.”
Gun-control-loving Dems might argue sending a retirement-age Queens resident to the slammer on what amounts to a vindictive technicality would be a deterrent.
But in their crime-ridden city, the only thing it will deter is honest people with the chutzpah to defend themselves and other New Yorkers.
Even if Hochul agrees with this flawed, self-loathing leftist argument, she should rightly worry about how much resentment outraged New Yorkers will show against her at the polls next November, when she is up for re-election.
A Manhattan Institute survey released in late October — before Foehner’s plea bargain — already showed Hochul losing to upstate Republican Rep. Elise Stefanik, who hadn’t yet even declared her candidacy. A Siena poll taken just before Foehner’s hearing found only 42% of New Yorkers would give Hochul another term in office, with 48% preferring someone else.
Allowing self-defending senior citizens to languish in jail for no good reason won’t help her already-troubled case before a hostile electorate.
“As we head into a pivotal election year,” Kenniff continued, “I encourage common sense New Yorkers of all political persuasions to call upon Governor Hochul to exercise her clemency power to spare Mr. Foehner from the brutality of an utterly unnecessary state prison sentence.”
If Hochul doesn’t act, she could soon find herself a failed former governor. And of course, her nightmare of more New Yorkers relocating to the Sunshine State might just come true.
Paul du Quenoy is Palm Beach Freedom Institute president.
