Yet because Massachusetts law does not deprive Indelicato of his civil rights, Indelicato can do what a federally convicted forger could not. But the ad hominem argument is somewhat misleading. Mass. Gen. Laws ch. Ultimately, there can be no perfect answer on a point that Congress did not consider. The issue before us is unlikely to matter outside of a very few states.
Most states do take away from every felon at least one of the three civil rights in question.
And most circuits have held that all three civil rights must be restored to avoid the federal ban. This too is unusual, the traditional distinction between felony and misdemeanor being the potential for a sentence of more than one year. This does not preclude the possibility that when Congress understands the implications of its statute for a problem it did not foresee, it may prefer another result. Here, the government concedes that misdemeanants in Massachusetts do not lose their civil rights. As this case illustrates all too well, the federal statute, as now drafted, gives rise to a host of difficult and obscure issues that Congress ought to resolve by reexamining this statute.