United States v. Reginald Dodd

OPINION OF THE COURT

RENDELL, Circuit Judge.

The sole issue presented in this appeal is the difficult question of who must bear the burden of persuasion when a criminal defendant raises a justification defense to the federal charge of being a felon in possession of a firearm in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 922(g)(1) (1994). We specifically reserved this question in United States v. Paolello, 951 F.2d 537 (3d Cir.1991), in which we defined the elements of the justification defense to § 922(g)(1). See Paolello, 951 F.2d at 544. We now conclude that, in a case such as this one, given the nature of the…