A 1950s-Era New York Knife Law Has Landed Thousands in Jail | Hacker News Reader

A 1950s-Era New York Knife Law Has Landed Thousands in Jail

villagevoice.com

108 pointsbra-ket42 comments

> 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.

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.

> 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.

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...

Juries' decisions have to be respected regardless of their reasoning, which is how "jury nullification" arose. However, they are supposed to only determine matters of fact (ie whether the defendant did something, rather than whether the law is just) and judges can deselect people who they don't trust to give an honest verdict based on fact alone.

So, judges deselecting such people is actually preserving the jury system, not attacking it.

See my other comment where a judge explicitly asked me about jury nullification.

I know of no reason they can't ask, and voir dire allows both prosecution and defense the option to exclude some potential jurors without saying why.

Jury verdict has to be unanimous, so she had to convince the majority by offering the argument, but they are instructed to judge on the basis of the law and she likely submitted to the thought that she was unable to derive the unjustice of the law from first principles, the constitution etc. not the least because the viability of law as is, whether subjectively unfair or not is... I don't think I could, either.

When I was on a jury I noticed that people with the strongest convictions end up winning so to speak. They make everyone understand they won't be persuaded and will drag the thing along. Everyone wants to go home to their lives so they end up not caring and just giving in eventually.

The only time I've been called for jury duty, they asked us various filtering questions (voir dire), one of which was "would we be able to make a decision based solely on the law itself and not circumstances or other factors?" (roughly)

I didn't answer an emphatic Yes like everyone else. When the judge asked if I was talking about jury nullification, I said not as a policy and I wouldn't do so lightly, but that I can't pretend my choices don't have consequences. Shortly thereafter I was dismissed at the request of the prosecution.

I was fine with being excluded, but I was horrified by the apparent difficulty most of the others had in answering basic logic questions. They asked questions like "if a legal restraining order says 'stay 1000 feet away', is someone who gets 990 feet away breaking the law?" and "what if they were doing so to help someone in danger, were they breaking the law?". Not only were people NOT applying only the (hypothetical) law, they were struggling to understand that that was what was happening.

One of friends who is a lawyer says that, guilty or innocent, if ever on trial he would never choose a jury trial. Until my experience I didn't understand why.

It's called jury nullification and it's sort of up in the air whether it's legal or oath breaking (I have no idea as I'm not American).

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jury_nullification

> 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.

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.

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

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...

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

Originally, i heard about it here[1]. You can read about the variability here[2]. But i would recommend searching for the raw data of the experiment, which i personally have not done. I would also recommend you read [3]. It is equally fascinating and horrifying. What is more, it is eerily prescient about where society has developed since Merloo wrote his book. To summarize (criminally), people do bad shit when they are forcefully conditioned to do so, and even then they fight back against this conditioning. You can hear it for yourself in the original recordings of the Milgram experiments; the actors tasked with being the "scientists" had to prod the subjects into doing the dirty. Make no mistake, i am a conservative that is deeply committed to the concept of the "fallen nature of man," rather, people are fundamentally flawed. We need very little assistance in acting selfishly. But history, science, and life is painfully clear: if you want to get people to hurt others without a selfishly motivated decision to do so, you have to work very hard.

[1]https://www.wnycstudios.org/story/180092-the-bad-show/ (~14:00) [2]https://www.npr.org/2013/08/28/209559002/taking-a-closer-loo... [3]https://www.amazon.com/Rape-Mind-Psychology-Menticide-Brainw...

The original experiment was WW2 - to be precise,normal Joes drafted into positions of power in conquered german territorys. There are no stories on large scale humanity rights violation beeing averted by sudden conciousness victiorious .

The experiments in that post-war context where mainly to understand the mechanism. And yes, average joe and jane, failed hard when it came to preserve basic humanity.

I'm sorry if this comes off as recklessly condescending, but the history of humans, good and bad, stretches far past what modern education has decided is the only relevant data point in the "good vs. evil" discussion, that being the holocaust. You can subtract the entirety of World War Two out of the equation, and you will still be inundated with examples on both sides of the spectrum. The idea that the atrocities of WWII were unique or different is a travesty of intellect. What makes WWII notable is merely scale, and the ramifications of this fact are damning to the legions of folks who like to pretend that religion is the greatest source of human evil. WWII is the biggest and best example that science and technology are demonstrably more destructive when applied to the problem of "opposition erasure."

I was on a jury, and I know several other people who were also on juries, and we didn't really follow the instructions. Everybody approached the case with their own point of view, and we had to argue a bit to get to a unanimous verdict even though it was obvious what the law said about what the defendant was charged with, and the defendant was obviously guilty.

Some people considered stuff we were told by the judge to disregard -- it didn't made a difference in the outcome in the case I was on, but I have no doubt it does in other cases.

The judge also warned us indirectly about jury nullification, which he said happened most often in marijuana cases. Judges mention it because they know it happens frequently.

Juries don't just follow instructions.

> The judge also warned us indirectly about jury nullification, which he said happened most often in marijuana cases.

What did the judge say? I was under the impression that nullification was a legal, if inconvenient, option for a jury to return.

Vice News just did a story about this 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.

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.

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

Looks like Cuomo vetoed it, twice:

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/24/nyregion/gravity-knife-cu...

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

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.

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.

"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.

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

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.

Which is basically a long-winded say of saying that British knife laws are exactly the kind of laws that should make a great weapon for racist police officers and prosecutors to use against racial minorities.

It's not that long winded. tialaramex said as much in xyr very first sentence.

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.

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.

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

Why are the only sources I can find when googling this from sites like Breitbart, Infowars, Daily Stormer, Daily Caller etc.

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

You're really a rather poor sort of Subject. Using a knife "all the time" makes you less helpless, not more as the State intends.

Ireland is even more strict than England. Carrying a knife of any sort is illegal unless you have a good reason for it - e.g. you're going camping or you're a chef. Even Swiss Army knives are technically illegal.

Yes. There are fairly tight criteria on what are allowed, mind: manual opening short blades with no serations that don't lock open and (I think) don't have finger guards are ok. Most Swiss Army knives are fine, most Gerbers and Crkts aren't. Mora's and other fixed blades are right out.

Edit to add: I carry an Opinel no 8, which is technically illegal on two fronts, but would be utterly impractical as a weapon. I've only ever had one problem doing so: one got confiscated at security going on the Millennium Wheel about a decade ago, but there was no other comeback from that and they're dirt cheap, so I just bought another.

It's worth noting that Crown Prosecutors are appointed, not elected as District Attornies are in America. Far less politics, pandering and electioneering which, anecdotally, leads to less vindicative prosecution.

Combining two ideas you heard from God-knows-where and juxtaposing them because you've categorized both as things you've heard "liberals" (or whatever group) believe is the lowest form of debate. Nobody finds it persuasive.

Some context: apparently there have been many stabbings in London recently:

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/london-murde...

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