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Elijah Woody

Case Summary

24-year-old Elijah Woody was a member of an open carry activist group called Hell’s Saints when, in September of 2014, he was arrested in Detroit for allegedly illegally carrying a concealed weapon. Police alleged that he had a handgun tucked into his waistband on a chilly winter day with his puffy coat supposedly flopped down over it.

Hell’s Saints was an activist group in Michigan that aimed to inform the public of their right to keep and bear arms. They regularly strolled through Michigan cities openly carrying firearms in accordance with Michigan's open carry law to spark educational conversation about the right to keep and bear arms.

At the time of the arrest, Woody was carrying a firearm, but not as a part of a Hell’s Saints event. None of the reports about the incident indicates or alleges that he harmed or threatened anyone in any way. Rather, this was an entirely nonviolent and nonthreatening exercise of rights supposedly guaranteed by the Second Amendment.

In a literal act of fashion policing, officers chose to make an arrest and put him at risk of five years in jail for his entirely peaceful behavior. Had Woody been convicted, he also potentially could have lost legal recognition of his Second Amendment-protected rights that he obviously values.

The incident was video recorded and a Detroit Police spokesman described the video as "pretty definitive as far as CCW charges go." Despite officers’ confidence that they had an open-and-shut case against Woody, jurors in his 2015 trial disagreed. On 16 January 2015, they found him not guilty.

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Research and Writing Credit: Kirsten C. Tynan
Photo Credits: Licensed from Adobe Stock.