The next chapter in the story of Deja Taylor is playing out and it’s raising some questions about our criminal justice system. Taylor is the mother of the six-year-old who infamously brought a loaded handgun to school and shot one of his teachers, seriously wounding her. The gun turned out to have belonged to his mother, who had failed to properly secure it in their home. Now she has entered a guilty plea in federal court and will face up to two years in prison. But she’s not being sentenced for a gun charge. She pleaded guilty to lying on her firearms permit application, failing to reveal that she had smoked marijuana. Yes, that’s technically a crime, but it’s one we likely never would have even known about had the shooting not taken place. (Associated Press)

The mother of a 6-year-old boy who shot his teacher in Virginia pleaded guilty in federal court Monday to using marijuana while possessing a firearm, which is illegal under U.S. law.

It’s a crime under federal law that’s facing increasing scrutiny as more states legalize the drug. Deja Taylor is accused of lying about her marijuana use on a form when she bought the gun, which her son later used to shoot Abby Zwerner in her classroom in Newport News. The first-grade teacher was seriously wounded and has endured multiple surgeries.

Taylor’s attorneys agreed to a negotiated plea agreement with prosecutors that calls for a sentence of 18 months to 24 months in prison. Sentencing is scheduled for Oct. 18.

This charge was only the federal offense. Taylor will face state charges in August, where she is accused of felony child neglect and reckless storage of a firearm.

The current charge is basically the same as one of the charges Hunter Biden is facing. Of course, the key difference is that the First Son is known to have been doing much harder and more dangerous drugs, along with other dubious activities. Marijuana has actually been legalized in Virginia, but it’s still a federal crime to possess it. (Though almost nobody is prosecuted for that anymore.)

What’s happening here seems to be fairly obvious. People were rightly enraged when they learned that a six-year-old child had gotten hold of a gun and shot someone. But you can’t really hold a child of that age accountable, so someone else would have to be made to pay to assuage the public’s anger. Since the mother was the registered owner of the firearm, she was a natural choice, but that meant that authorities would have to find something to charge her with.

The reckless storage and child neglect charges seem reasonable enough, I suppose. But the federal charge of lying on a firearm permit application may face some issues. Not only has marijuana been decriminalized in Virginia, but two judges in Oklahoma and Texas have ruled that bans on people who use marijuana owning firearms are unconstitutional. That only applies in parts of their own states for now, but there is legislation pending in Congress that might remove the prohibition federally.

I’m not saying that Deja Taylor is completely innocent and shouldn’t face some sort of accountability for her failure to properly secure her firearm. But this wasn’t an act of malice. She made a mistake, though it was admittedly almost a deadly one. And yet it does seem like the prosecutors in Virginia are scrambling to throw the book at her as hard as they can possibly manage. That’s really not how justice is supposed to work.