Plaintiff Wins $57,000 Settlement Over False Gravity
Knife Arrest
By Jon Campbell
Tuesday, September 1, 2015 | 6 days ago
An electrician’s assistant arrested for possession of a
"gravity knife" has reached a $57,000 settlement with the NYPD, after
prosecutors admitted that the knife in question was not actually illegal.
Bernard
Perez, 48, was arrested in September of 2014 after a traffic stop in East New
York. After running his license, police claimed Perez had an active arrest
warrant. It was only after he was hauled off to jail that police determined the
warrant — which was twenty years old, according to Perez's lawyer — belonged to
another man. Unable to hold him on a faulty warrant, the officer named in the
suit, Justin Delmonico, instead charged Perez with criminal possession of a
weapon for the pocketknife Perez, an electrician, used for work.
The
arrest is similar to the kind the Voice has been chronicling for nearly a year.
Tens of thousands of New Yorkers over the past decade have been caught up in
what many say is the unfair, racially disproportionate enforcement of a
half-century-old state law that bans so-called gravity knives, or
spring-activated knives that can open with a flick of the wrist. A Voice
analysis of stop-and-frisk data showed that black and Hispanic suspects were
nearly twice as likely to be arrested for carrying the knives as their white
counterparts also caught with them. Despite pushback from the state judiciary,
the public defender community, and Democratic lawmakers — and even a
constitutional court challenge — the law remains unchanged.
The
gravity knife statute makes it illegal to possess any knife that opens with the
force of gravity or centrifugal force. As we detailed in a lengthy
investigation last October, the definition is, in practice, quite subjective,
as virtually any modern pocketknife can be made to open with a vigorous “wrist
flick.” An officer with a little practice can therefore turn many legal knives
into illegal weapons with a little effort. As Legal Aid Society attorney Hara
Robrish explained to us last fall, "the police have become very adept at
opening these knives."
Perez
insisted the knife he was carrying was not illegal, but still spent 48 hours in
a jail cell. When the arresting officer was asked, at the insistence of Perez’s
public defender, to demonstrate the knife’s ability to flick open, he was
unable to do so. The Brooklyn district attorney prosecuting the case ultimately
conceded that the knife was nothing more than a common utility knife, and
dropped the case.
The NYPD
consistently accounts for more settlement costs than any other municipal
agency. Only days after Perez’s settlement was reached, New York City
Comptroller Scott Stringer’s office released a tally of total settlement
payouts by the city in 2014, which found settlements related to the NYPD at
$216.9 million. That’s a dramatic increase from just one year earlier, when the
figure was $138.1 million.
Mayor
Bill de Blasio has said he wants to reduce these settlement payouts. And
according to Perez's attorney, Joel Berger, the Law Department’s response to
the suit indicates just how far the city will go to deny a claim, even in cases
that involve obvious injustice.
“What
we’ve been seeing for the past several years is that the city’s law department
will say anything, just make up anything, to save the city a few bucks,” Berger
says.
Even
after Perez’s case was filed, and after the D.A. admitted that the knife Perez
was carrying was not, in fact, a gravity knife, the department continued to
argue that the arrest was proper. Acknowledging that the knife could not be
“flicked open” when the case was being prosecuted — and was therefore not
illegal — the city’s attorney in Perez’s civil case nonetheless maintained that
it had been “flickable” when the arrest occurred. It had, in essence, become
legal only after it was recovered and stored in an evidence locker.
Berger
calls that argument “ridiculous.” “We’re talking about the physical properties
of a physical object,” he said. To argue that the passage of time can somehow
make an illegal knife legal seems a bit disingenuous, in his view. He also says
this was the “worst example” he’d ever seen of the city’s refusal to compensate
in reasonable cases.
Yet the
notion that a knife's legality might change over its lifespan is something
numerous defense attorneys discussed with the Voice last year. A knife that
isn’t flickable when it’s purchased can become so as the knife gets older — as
wear and tear sets in and hinges loosen.
They say
that puts New Yorkers who use knives at work, a contingent that includes many
blue-collar workers, in the position of not knowing whether their knife becomes
prohibited under law.
That
uncertainly also figures into a constitutional challenge of the gravity knife
statute that’s currently being litigated in Manhattan. The city argued in that
case that the way to avoid arrest from, say, a loose hinge is to check and
continuously recheck a knife’s “flickability.” In other cases, knives
specifically designed to comply with laws like New York’s have still landed
people in jail.
Ultimately,
Berger says he was happy with the settlement agreement, but was disappointed
that the Law Department pushed the case as far as it did; he believes the
reticence to compensate people for bad police work can exacerbate tensions
between the police and the community. And he thinks the gravity knife law is
too subject to abuse.
“Most of
the time they’re picking on working people; they’re honest, hardworking people
who get caught up in this stuff. It's just another form of harassment,” Berger
says.
The Law
Department declined to discuss the case in detail, saying in an emailed message
only that "resolving the litigation was in the city's best interest."
Perez v. NYC - Gravity Knife Lawsuit
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