One of the most disturbing features of the US justice system is its ever more grotesque loss of proportion, at the federal level and in far too many states and municipalities. On his radio show this week, Derb discusses the case of Meredith Graves, the Tennessee nurse who, upon visiting the 9/11 memorial in New York and seeing the signs forbidding firearms, asked the staff if she could check her pistol (lawful and licensed in her home state). She was handcuffed, arrested, and now faces three and a half years in jail for firearms possession – for the crime of being unaware that the Second Amendment does not apply in New York City.
Asked about the case, New York’s thuggish mayor decided to add insult to injury:
Let’s assume that she didn’t get arrested for carrying a gun. She probably would have gotten arrested for the cocaine that was in her pocket.
There was no cocaine. The white stuff in her pocket was analyzed by Bloomberg’s cops and found to be, as the nurse had said it was, aspirin powder. So this loathsome slug of a man has slandered an ordinary American citizen on tape in front of the world. Why? Because he can.
As Kevin Williamson wrote:
You can be confident that Meredith Graves will be locked up, because it is far easier to lock up law-abiding types such as Meredith Graves than it is to police the criminals who actually do the murders and muggings. This isn’t a question of whether the government’s behavior is constitutional or unconstitutional, but of whether the government’s behavior constitutes government, of whether it makes any sense at all, and of whether government can establish elementary priorities and exercise elementary discretion.
Anyone with any knowledge of New York City’s standard operating procedure could have guessed the answer to that. But we might have known that Bloomberg would effortlessly sink to new depths. It is outrageous that his enforcers are obtuse enough to seek jail time for Meredith Graves. But it is entirely unacceptable for the chief executive of a major American jurisdiction to slur innocent private citizens as coke snorters simply because he’s in power and they’re not. Like Derb, I hope Mrs Graves sues the pants off this tinpot toad.