Sunday night police in Denver shot a man after claiming he charged at them with a knife. Witnesses at the time disputed that claim. Now surveillance footage from a nearby business supports the witnesses over the police version. Instead of charging toward the officers, the video shows Paul Castaway holding the knife to his own throat the entire time.

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Additionally, police originally claimed that Castaway had stabbed his mother and that she had been taken to the hospital with injuries, as a result. They later revised that to him having threatened her and caused minor injuries to her neck. Witnesses once again dispute that, stating she has no injuries at all. Rick Morado, Castaway’s cousin, contends that he was really just trying to get away and not attacking the police. As has often been the case in past police shootings, Castaway’s mother now says she regrets calling the police.

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K9 Nitro died of heat exhaustion after the air conditioner unit in the patrol car malfunctioned as outside temperatures reached 106 degrees.

Nitro had just apprehended a subject who fled during a warrant service in the 8600 block of Santa Paula Way. His handler placed him back in their patrol vehicle and then returned to assist the other officers. His handler returned to the vehicle approximately 15 minutes later and discovered that Nitro was in distress. He transported Nitro to a nearby veterinary clinic, but he died a short time later.

It was determined that the patrol car's air conditioner malfunctioned and stopped working.

K9 Hector and K9 Jimmy died of heat exhaustion after accidentally being left in their handler's vehicle following his shift and a callout to assist a neighboring agency.

Their handler had completed his midnight shift when the other agency requested Jimmy to conduct a track of a critically missing person. Following the search the handler returned home. Approximately nine hour later he discovered that Hector and Jimmy had been left in the back of the department vehicle and were both deceased.

The North Florida Chief Circuit Judge who issued an unconstitutional order barring citizens from video recording the outside of a Jacksonville courthouse, prompting national criticism along with a federal lawsuit from PINAC, has rescinded his order.

Fourth Circuit Chief Judge Mark Mahon rescinded his order Wednesday, two days after a former Jacksonville judge from the same circuit agreed to join PINAC in its lawsuit, further embarrassing the rookie chief judge among his peers.

In his latest order, Mahon explains that he issued the initial order banning photography and protests outside the courthouse in order to ensure “a fair trial” for defendants that he does not name.

For years, New York's gravity-knife law has been formally opposed by a broad swath of the legal community. Elected officials call the statute "flawed" and "unfair." Defense attorneys call it "outrageous" and "ridiculous" -- or worse. Labor unions, which have seen a parade of members arrested for tools they use on the job, say the law is woefully outdated. Even the Office of Court Administration -- the official body of the New York State judiciary -- says the law is unjustly enforced and needs to change. They've petitioned the legislature to do just that.

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Law enforcement agencies don't track gravity-knife crimes as a class, which may explain why the frequency of those arrests has gone largely unreported in the news media. But a Village Voice analysis of data from several sources suggests there have been as many as 60,000 gravity-knife prosecutions over the past decade, and that the rate has more than doubled in that time. If those estimates are correct, it's enough to place gravity-knife offenses among the top 10 most prosecuted crimes in New York City.

The increase seems to be the result of a confluence of forces. Changes in knife design have played a part, as modern features have nudged the most popular styles closer to the edge of the legal definition. But the NYPD's stop-and-frisk program also may be one driver. A prime rationale for the policy has always been weapon recovery; former NYPD commissioner Ray Kelly put that goal front and center in a 2013 Wall Street Journal op-ed, pointing out that stop-and-frisk had "taken tens of thousands of weapons off the street" over the previous decade.

But about 80 percent of weapons recovered under stop-and-frisk were knives, according to an analysis of the department's own statistics. And experts say the vast majority of those were likely misclassified as "gravity knives." Whether deliberate or not, dramatically expanding the definition of an illegal knife has not only landed thousands of innocent people in jail -- it also had the effect of making stop-and-frisk appear far more effective than it actually was.



Prosecutions under the law that bans gravity knives have increased significantly over the past decade, a rise that largely tracks the increasing numbers of stop-and-frisk encounters through 2011.

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Gravity-knife arrests may be popular for another reason. Most, like Neal's, result from simple observation of a "pocket clip," often readily visible. All officers need to do is keep their eyes peeled, and they can add another misdemeanor to their tally -- or, if they're lucky, a felony.

Matt Galluzzo, a former assistant district attorney in Manhattan, now a defense attorney in private practice, says that for many officers, a gravity-knife arrest is simply a hard collar to pass up. "You don't have to fight the guy, you don't have to chase him," Galluzzo says. "It's an easy way to make an arrest. And they're under pressure to make arrests." A poster on Officer.com, a verified online message board for law enforcement officers, put it bluntly in 2013 when he advised a rookie to be on the lookout for "GKs": "make sure they have a prior conviction so you can bump it up to that felony!!!"

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Even worse, critics charge, is that officials have prosecuted knife users aggressively while doing little to address the source of those same knives, which are sold openly at reputable retailers all over the city. New York State assemblyman Dan Quart, a Democrat from Manhattan, says there's an obvious contradiction at play: "You can walk in and purchase one of these knives over the counter," he says, "and then walk out and get arrested."


Cases like Neal's that result in long prison sentences are unusual. But thousands end up in handcuffs every year. Of the dozens of cases examined by the Voice, few involved instances of violence and most saw individuals arrested for possessing a knife they used for work. Since 2003, knife-carrying maintenance workers, plumbers, coffee-shop employees -- even a Bible-camp counselor -- have landed in jail.

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Nate Appleman, a food-world heavyweight and contestant on The Next Iron Chef a few years back, was arrested on account of the pocketknife he uses to open cardboard boxes. Professional photographer Steven Counts had never been in trouble with the law -- not even so much as a speeding ticket -- when he was surrounded by five officers in downtown Manhattan last summer. Counts was on his way to lunch when one of them spotted, on the pocket of his jeans, the clip for a knife he uses to construct studio backdrops. Stagehands are so frequently targeted that the major union representing them started publishing legal advice about pocketknives in its monthly newsletter.

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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. Glaser herself carries a Swiss Army knife on her keychain.

"It just seemed like a trumped-up charge," she says. "And it certainly doesn't seem like it's enforced equally across the board."



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The original gravity knife -- the type legislators targeted when they banned them half a century ago -- bears no resemblance to the kind that landed Richard Neal and thousands of others in jail over the last decade. Developed by the German military for use by paratroopers during World War II, the idea behind a gravity knife was simple: An unlucky parachutist who found himself in a tight spot -- tangled in a tree, for example -- would be able to access the knife even with injuries or limited mobility. Simply press a button and the blade would literally fall out of the handle and lock in place.

...By the 1950s they had become the stuff of nightmares, closely associated with inner-city youth gangs, thanks in part to films like Rebel Without a Cause and Blackboard Jungle, which ends in a classroom brawl between a badly outnumbered public school teacher and his crazed, switchblade-wielding students.
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Even though they were nearly identical in design, gravity knives lacked a spring, a key characteristic of the newly illegal switchblades. So manufacturers stuck with warehouses full of worthless knives simply removed the springs and went on selling, calling the new products "gravity knives."

Finally, in 1958, the federal government banned the importation and interstate transport of both switchblades and gravity knives. The prohibition effectively killed the domestic market, and after that, true gravity knives largely vanished from store shelves.

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Under Penal Law 265.01, a gravity knife is defined as any knife that opens with "the force of gravity or the application of centrifugal force" and has a blade that locks into place by means of a "button, spring, lever, or other device."

Courts have interpreted that to mean that any knife that can be opened with a "wrist flick" -- a movement something like what a fan dancer might do -- qualifies as a gravity knife. A long list of court cases have turned on exactly that question, which seems straightforward enough.

The problem, Robrish came to realize, is that with enough force, and enough practice, virtually any pocketknife can be flicked open like a "gravity knife," whether it was designed to operate that way or not.

"A person might have one of these knives, and they've never in their lives tried to open it that way," Robrish says. "They have no idea that it does open that way."

Jim Furgal, a former knife-industry representative who frequently testifies as an expert witness at gravity-knife trials, said the language of the statute is part of the problem. But changes in knife design have also exacerbated the issue.

In the 1960s, most pocketknives looked like the classic Swiss Army variety, Furgal explains. They were designed to be opened with two hands, typically by means of a small fingernail indent on the blade. On two-handed knives like those, the spring pressure holding the blade in the closed position is considerable. Even with a vigorous flick, it won't open.

But beginning in the mid-1990s, more and more companies began designing their knives to open with only one hand. Most models of this type have a small "thumb stud" on the blade for just this purpose. It's a convenience feature, Furgal explains, so the user can keep one hand free for other tasks.

But that design change had an unfortunate side effect. For a blade to easily open with one hand, the spring pressure holding the blade in the closed position has to be relatively light. That reduced tension makes such knives far easier to "flick."

Simple wear-and-tear compounds the problem, Robrish found. After years of use, the hinge of a knife has a tendency to loosen up; a knife that was perfectly legal when it was purchased could actually become illegal over time. A quarter-turn of a screw is all it takes for a worn-out knife to become a potential felony.

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Air pistols and air rifles; selling or possessing. 1. It shall be unlawful for any person to sell, offer to sell or have in such person's possession any air pistol or air rifle or similar instrument in which the propelling force is a spring or air, except that the sale of such instruments if accompanied by delivery to a point without the city, and possession for such purpose, shall not be unlawful if such per son shall have secured an annual license from the police commissioner of the city authorizing such sale and possession. The sale and delivery of such instruments within the city from one licensee to another licensee, and the use of such instruments in connection with an amusement licensed by the department of consumer affairs or at rifle or pistol ranges duly authorized by law shall not be considered a violation of this subdivision.

n November 2013, officer Tyler Walker and several other officers were dispatched to a residence over reports of a gun. The officers found no probable cause, but they did encounter an inebriated 18-year-old girl, Alexis Acker.

According to reports, Acker was “intoxicated and verbally uncooperative with police,” and became “physically combative” when officers arrested her boyfriend on an unrelated warrant.

Their claims of Acker being “physically combative,” however, hold very little water after reading their report of what was caught on a hospital surveillance camera. The video, obtained by the Colorado Springs Independent, was just discovered as a part of an in-depth report looking into the issue of police brutality.

Acker was arrested on charges of resisting arrest and assault on a police officer.

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At the beginning of the video, we see Walker escorting in the 100 lb girl into the hospital without incident. Acker appears to be compliant, but she apparently took too long to sit down after being told to sit down.

Walker proceeded to give her a little encouragement to sit down and shoved her into the chair with apparent excessive force. As a natural reaction to being attacked while handcuffed, Acker kicked her leg out.

...After suffering a foot to his pant leg, Walker punched Acker in the chest. He then grabbed the tiny, handcuffed, and inebriated teen and body slammed her face first onto the hospital floor, injuring her neck and knocking out her teeth.

In one report, police claim that Walker “rolled her out of the chair to the floor.” In another report, police claim that Walker “escorted Ms. Acker to the floor.” Watch the video below and decide for yourself if either these reports are accurate.

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Because Walker injured himself while body slamming the teen, he was advised of his rights as the victim by CSPD. The department refuses to say whether or not Walker faced any discipline for his actions. He remains on regular duty.

In the meantime, it will be the taxpayers of Colorado Springs who will foot the potential $500,000 bill for the lawsuit on Acker’s behalf.