
A 1950s-Era New York Knife Law Has Landed Thousands in Jail - bra-ket
https://www.villagevoice.com/2014/10/07/how-a-50s-era-new-york-knife-law-has-landed-thousands-in-jail/#page-all
======
Lazare
> Carla Glaser, 47, who served as a juror on a gravity-knife case in
> Manhattan, calls the situation “ludicrous.” She still feels sick about the
> conviction she was compelled to hand out, to a man who was initially stopped
> by police for being in a city park after nightfall. Although the law was, in
> her view, deeply flawed, she felt she had no choice but to vote with the
> majority.

I wonder if she realises that she's actually culpable here? Juries should be a
check on unjust laws, not an enabler of them. She had a choice; she just opted
not to exercise it.

~~~
dlwdlw
Judges specifically filter out for people who know about jury nullification. I
suspect the entire systems subconsciously also filters FOR and AGAINST certain
types of people in service of whatever the narrative of the time was.

The people who speak out about injustice who have been part of the system are
allies. If you expect perfect allies, then you make no change.

~~~
black_puppydog
> Judges specifically filter out for people who know about jury nullification.

I guess you mean subconsciously? Directly asking someone if they know about
jury nullification, then rejecting them on whatever grounds would intuitively
sound very fishy to me. Rejecting them _explicitely_ for knowledge of jury
nullification would sound to me like a direct attack on the jury system
itself. And I don't know how to find out if someone knows about it without
asking them... Then again, I'm not a lawyer.

~~~
kasey_junk
There is case law suggesting that jurors can be removed if you suspect they
are going to nullify the law.

There is also case law supporting jury instructions against nullification and
for preventing defense attorneys from using it as a tactic.

I'd go so far as to say that there is an _explicit_ bias against jury
nullification in the courts system.

The wikipedia article is particularly weak on this subject, but the reference
list is good:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jury_nullification#United_Stat...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jury_nullification#United_States)

------
TillE
> She still feels sick about the conviction she was compelled to hand out

It occurs to me that the entire jury system is basically the Milgram
experiment writ large. It's the only thing that helps explain how people can
so consistently be persuaded to abandon their own sense of moral judgement and
just follow instructions.

~~~
classicsnoot
This one is so fascinating, given that the Milgram Experiment(s) (it was
actually a full battery of tests under many different circumstances with a
control group) showed categorically that people do not, in fact, follow
through with torture just because they were ordered to. However, in one of the
tests, the subjects persisted. This instance, for obvious reasons, gets the
lion's share of attention, and the actual data generated from the study is
rendered inconsequential. A thousand people can do the right thing with no
monetary or status gain, but one person acts in 'disgusting' self interest,
and 40 years of exposés will be written about the easy fallibility of the
average Joe.

All this to say, most people feel guilt in one of two ways: in the commission
of an act (or the prior contemplation there of) or upon critical review of the
act. Not a profound observation, granted, but which crowd is present during
The Review will have a heavy influence on the introspection that occurs. Food
for thought.

~~~
firic
Do you have a source for that? Wikipedia makes it seem like most of the people
followed through with the experiment.

~~~
nyolfen
op may be referring to this:

>“The notion that we somehow automatically obey authority, that we are somehow
programmed, doesn’t account for the variability [in rates of obedience] across
conditions,” he said; in some iterations of Milgram’s study, the rate of
compliance was close to 100 percent, while in others it was closer to zero.
“We need an account that can explain the variability—when we obey, when we
don’t.”

[https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/01/rethinkin...](https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/01/rethinking-
one-of-psychologys-most-infamous-experiments/384913/)

the experiment has recently come under more critical attention (along with
much of social psychology)

------
rmusial
Vice News just did a story about this
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S2S_4G103Ik](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S2S_4G103Ik)

It's short and worth watching. It shows how the law could definitely be used
in an unequal manner, the background, and how Doug Ritter and the Knife Rights
group works with groups like The Legal Aid Society.

------
JoeAltmaier
I didn't find any true measure of 'racial bias' in the article. We learned
that fewer white people are arrested. But we didn't learn what fraction of
each profile group actually carried knives.

I wouldn't be surprised at all if bias exists; I just didn't read it in the
article.

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BCM43
If it's not obvious to others, this is from 2014. I'm not sure how things have
changed since then.

~~~
kxyvr
Looks like Cuomo vetoed it, twice:

[https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/24/nyregion/gravity-knife-
cu...](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/24/nyregion/gravity-knife-cuomo-
veto.html)

------
bradknowles
The article is from 2014, but it’s still a good one.

------
pascalxus
It makes you wonder how many other ridiculous laws there are out there, that
just any innocent person could get arrested for.

Considering this, I'd say we owe it to society to at the very least enform
everyone what's legal and what's not. Maybe, make basic law part of the high
school curriculum or something.

------
adventured
It's interesting to watch London implementing stop and frisk policies while
practically outlawing all carrying of knives. That doesn't seem to have
elicitied much of a reponse from the liberal media in the US of course. I
thought the inherently wise Western European policies were the ones the US is
supposed to be following.

~~~
tialaramex
"Sus" (the practice of searching people purely because a police officer
decides they're suspicious, which ends up invariably distorted by racial
biases) ended years ago. New laws about untargetted searches are of course
controversial.

London, like the entire rest of England forbids carrying weapons in public
without a lawful purpose. The person from this article had, as I understand
it, a lawful purpose. It also isn't generally legal to sell the weapons which
the law says have no lawful purpose, such as brass knuckles, and various
weapons familiar from martial arts movies. So you can't easily end up owning
them and not realising you won't be allowed to carry them anywhere.

If you take your big fishing knife to go out drinking and there's a fight so
the police are called, then yeah, there's a good chance you'll get done for
having the knife without a lawful purpose - ain't no fishing inside the bar,
should have left that at home.

~~~
robk
What about a chef who is of color in a bad neighborhood? Who is the arbiter of
"purpose"?

~~~
tialaramex
At arrest, a police officer. It's their choice whether they think your excuse
means they shouldn't arrest you. After that, a CPS prosecutor, whose job is to
decide whether they should try to convict you of some crime or not based on
the public interest tests.

At trial, ultimately this would be a matter for a jury. But "bad
neighbourhood" definitely doesn't come into it, "I need it for self defence"
doesn't constitute a lawful purpose.

The chef's defence gets to introduce any excuse the chef may believe he has,
but it's like to be subject to fairly intense cross from the prosecutors. On
the other hand sometimes these excuses are ludicrous, and the court is
entitled to tell the jury that they don't have to credit such an excuse just
because it wasn't explicitly rebutted by the prosecution.

The main thrust of this article is that it's wrong to even be _arresting_
these people never mind jailing them. And you can't solve the former in the
courts.

~~~
a2tech
While we're on the the subject of English knife laws--do people just not carry
pocket knives? I always have a knife with me and use it all the time.

~~~
dagw
I haven't lived in England for years, but the law used to be that as long as
it was a folding blade under 7 cm you where OK.

~~~
AllegedAlec
Not any more. A man was arrested not too long ago for carrying a potato
peeler.

~~~
dragonwriter
A potato peeler would usually not have a folding blade, so this, even if true,
doesn't actually contradict the grandparent.

