By Shayna Jacobs
DNAinfo Reporter/Producer
MANHATTAN SUPREME COURT — A knife advocacy group is suing the city and Manhattan District Attorney for allegedly going too far in interpreting what constitutes an illegal pocket knife.
Last year, DA Cyrus Vance Jr. announced a deal with some of the city's major retailers that sold knives including Paragon, Eastern Mountain Sports and Home Depot. They agreed to stop selling the pocket knives, which easily switch open.
The DA's office promotes the removal of knives on the street and has said that stabbings accounted for about a third of Manhattan's homicides in 2009.
But the suit says that police and prosecutors consider too many knives illegal because investigators cannot always easily tell the difference between folding knives that open automatically — through gravity or an internal mechanism — and ones that merely appear to open more easily due to their design.
With many folding knife brands, there is a "mechanical resistance" that may cause the blade to open or close more easily. Prosecutors have determined those are illegal gravity knives, said David Jensen, who filed the claim on behalf of the advocacy group Knife Rights.
"What's going on on a somewhat selected basis is people who are found carrying folding knives are being charged with criminal possession of a weapon and the charge is most commonly that they're carrying a gravity knife," Jensen said.
The group is not asking for monetary damages, just a ruling from a federal judge to clarify what they believe is a poor application of the state's penal code.
They have also named Attorney Eric Schneiderman in the civil action, based on his responsibility for New York State law enforcement. The group is also demanding the court rule that certain blades, which do not pop open, be declared legal by the court.
The DA and other law enforcement "sometimes interpret these state laws so broadly that they deem any common folding knife to be prohibited, regardless of how readily it can actually be opened."
Due to the confusion, people who carry knives for work or legitimate purposes find themselves charged with weapons possession and subjected to jail time, according to an attorney for Knife Rights, an Arizona non-profit.
The federal civil rights suit was filed Thursday on behalf of Manhattan painter John Copeland, 34, who was arrested on Oct. 10, 2010 on the Lower East Side near his apartment with a three-inch folding knife.
Copeland purchased the blade from Paragon — a Union Square sporting goods store that later entered an agreement with the DA's office to stop selling such knives.
His case was dismissed by prosecutors through a community service deal. He also had to pay a fine.
They have also filed the claim on behalf of Pedro Perez, 44, another artist, who was charged with possessing an illegal knife when police spotted its metal clip on his pocket at a subway station.
Vance's office declined to comment on the lawsuit.
