DENVER—A federal appeals court panel has upheld the conviction of a former Denver firefighter found guilty of illegally selling a machine gun.
Stan Ford was convicted in June 2006 on a single weapons count and acquitted on three others. He was sentenced in March 2007 to a year and a day in prison.
Ford argued on appeal that the government withheld exculpatory e-mails sent between him and an informant in the case.
A lower court found that three undisclosed e-mails did exist, but determined they wouldn’t have affected the outcome of the trial. The lower court denied Ford’s post-trial motion to set aside his conviction.
In a decision issued Thursday, a three-judge panel of the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals agreed, saying the undisclosed e-mails “were not sufficiently material to cast doubt on the jury’s verdict.”
