The Manhattan district attorney is reported to be in plea-deal negotiations with Meredith Graves, the nurse who faces serious felony firearms charges after bringing her Tennessee-permitted .32-caliber pistol to Ground Zero, apparently unaware of the fact that New York declines to recognize out-of-state concealed-carry licenses, and that New York City declines to recognize even New York State permits. Ms. Graves, upon seeing the no-guns sign at the memorial, naïvely asked a security guard whether it would be possible to check in her pistol; this attempt to comply with the posted rules resulted in her arrest, and could well result in her being sent to prison — for years. If reports of a plea bargain are accurate, then District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. recognizes that justice would not be served by this outcome, which speaks well of his sense of prosecutorial discretion. It would speak even better of him if the case were to be dismissed entirely, along with the similar prosecution of former U.S. Marine Ryan Jerome, who was arrested under similar circumstances.
New York City may not be full of people who believe in American Exceptionalism, but it is stuffed to the gills with people who believe in New York Exceptionalism, and it maintains a firearms-regulation regime that may be unconstitutional and certainly is far more strict than the practice of most of the rest of the country. So draconian are its laws in the matter of concealed firearms that the plain dictionary meanings of words commonly are discarded: Ms. Graves stands to be convicted of a violent felony, even though she plainly had no criminal intent, much less violent criminal intent. Likewise, a person may be charged with carrying a loaded gun even when the gun is in fact unloaded and kept in a locked carrying case, if the ammunition is kept in the same case. Under New York law, up is down, unloaded is loaded, and an innocent error is a malicious crime of violence.
New York’s strict gun laws do little or nothing to keep guns out of the hands of violent criminals, something that probably was very much on the mind of Mr. Jerome, who became a jeweler after his honorable discharge from the Marine Corps and was carrying $15,000 worth of gold as part of his work. Like Ms. Graves, he attempted to surrender his gun to security guards, in his case when visiting the Empire State Building. Landmark skyscrapers in New York City face a great many serious threats, but Mr. Jerome is not among them. If anything, the presence of an armed Marine, among the most rigorously trained fighting men in the world, would render the Empire State Building marginally safer from the parlous uncertainties of 21st-century urban life. Indeed, New York might have two more very tall buildings if a few such men had been present in a couple of airliner cabins a decade ago.
New York mayor Mike Bloomberg, an anti-gun zealot (among his many comical obsessions), slandered Ms. Graves when he told the press that even without the gun charges, she “would have been arrested for the cocaine in her pocket.†That “cocaine†turns out to have been aspirin, which Ms. Graves will no doubt need, given the headache that New York is giving her. Mayor Bloomberg owes her an apology.
A concealed-carry permit is not a driver’s license. Barring an interstate compact or a constitutional finding to the contrary, a healthy respect for federalism requires that the state and the city of New York be entitled to a great deal of discretion in these matters, including the discretion to enact such pointlessly restrictive and ill-advised statutes as those currently on the books. But a pharisaical insistence upon the law’s letter in every case is the beaten path to injustice, as every prosecutor knows. And while ignorance of the law and lack of criminal intent may not be defenses under the language of the statutes, they must weigh heavily in favor of Ms. Graves and Mr. Jerome, each of whom faces a minimum sentence of three-and-a-half years in prison — which, for a sense of proportion, is three-and-a-half years more than at least one high-profile former New York prosecutor received for his well-documented crimes. A particularly zealous judge could impose a sentence of 15 years.
Mr. Vance should head off this injustice, and New York’s elected officials should revisit the feckless and fanatical legal regime that has produced it.
