Every now and then, the Supreme Court takes up a case involving a public official who acted so foolishly — without any regard for the ordinary norms governing law enforcement, or without any insight into how their actions could undermine some of the government’s most important work — that you wish the justices could each take turns smacking them upside the head.
National Rifle Association v. Vullo, which the Court announced that it would hear last Friday, is such a case. It involves two unrelated actions which former New York State Department of Financial Services (DFS) Superintendent Maria Vullo took against the NRA, one of which successfully shut down an NRA program that recklessly endangered countless New Yorkers’ lives — and one of which recklessly endangered Vullo’s effort to shut down this potentially deadly program.
In 2017, DFS opened an investigation into “Carry Guard,” an NRA-endorsed insurance program that, according to the federal appeals court that heard the Vullo case, “provided liability defense coverage for criminal proceedings resulting from firearm use even where the insured acted with criminal intent.”
Carry Guard offered to pay both the civil and criminal legal costs (up to $1 million for a civil case, and up to $150,000 for a criminal case) of its customers who shot another person, allegedly in self-defense. The NRA actively promoted this insurance to its members as a product that would give them peace of mind if they shot another human being. One pitch to the NRA’s members told them that “you should never be forced to choose between defending your life … and putting yourself and your family in financial ruin.”
For reasons that should be obvious, New York generally does not permit insurance contracts intended to “insure a person for that person’s intentional criminal acts,” and it certainly doesn’t permit the kind of insurance that may pay out if a beneficiary commits a violent crime with a deadly…
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