## Facts

- Police responded to a “man with a gun” complaint at Hugh A. Kipp, Jr.’s Wilmington home; he ultimately surrendered and was taken for a psychological evaluation.
- Officers searching the home found a handgun, two unloaded shotguns, and ammunition; they also found two hunting bows with arrows.
- A records check indicated Kipp was statutorily prohibited from possessing “deadly weapons” due to a prior conviction.
- Kipp was charged with multiple offenses; after the complaining witness did not cooperate, the prosecution proceeded only on counts alleging Possession of a Deadly Weapon by a Person Prohibited.
- Kipp’s prohibited status stemmed from a 1990 guilty plea to third-degree assault, a misdemeanor “crime of violence” resulting in physical injury.
- The 1990 guilty-plea form included a warning that a guilty plea would result in loss of the right to possess deadly weapons, but that portion of the form was marked “N/A.”
- Neither the prosecutor nor the plea judge corrected the “N/A” notation or otherwise alerted Kipp that the plea would trigger a weapons disability.
- In a later bench trial, Kipp testified he understood “N/A” to mean the weapons-disability consequence did not apply and that he believed he remained legally permitted to possess weapons.

## Issues

1. Whether a defendant may avoid liability for possessing a deadly weapon as a prohibited person when his belief that he was not prohibited resulted from affirmative, erroneous official information in a prior plea proceeding.
2. Whether convictions premised on a weapons disability may stand when the State’s own plea documentation and plea-court silence reasonably induced the defendant’s misunderstanding about that disability.

## Decision

- The Delaware Supreme Court reversed Kipp’s three convictions for Possession of a Deadly Weapon by a Person Prohibited.
- The court accepted the State’s confession of error as consistent with the record and governing law.
- The court concluded Kipp established a defense based on good-faith, reasonable reliance on erroneous official information arising from the 1990 plea documentation and related omissions.

## Legal Principles

- Mistake of law generally does not excuse criminal liability, but a narrow exception applies when a defendant reasonably relies in good faith on affirmative, official misinformation about the law’s requirements or consequences.
- Official plea documentation that incorrectly represents a legal consequence, combined with prosecutorial and judicial failure to correct the error, can constitute the type of State-induced misinformation that supports this exception.
- When the State creates and maintains a reasonable misunderstanding about a legal disability arising from a conviction, it may not later obtain a conviction that depends on the defendant having known he was subject to that disability.

## Conclusion

The court vacated Kipp’s weapon-possession convictions because the State’s erroneous plea form and failure to correct it reasonably led him to believe his prior misdemeanor plea did not bar him from possessing deadly weapons, bringing the case within a limited official-misinformation exception to the usual rule that mistake of law is no defense.


Kipp v. State, 704 A.2d 839 (Del. 1998)