I hate to keep correcting you, and please don’t take this as a personal affront. It is obvious you are not involved in the legal system.
The affidavit has to contain the statutory language that the person is charged under. What you are seeing is a redacted form of the charging document, the “affidavit”.
Normally the information is presented in this form with the verbiage from the code as the first portion of the complaint. Then, usually, you will find something like this...”To wit: Mr Grey was observed standing on the corner of blank and blank with another male. This officer observed Mr Grey conduct a hand-to-hand transaction with the other male. When Mr. Grey observed this officer, he ran in a ___ direction. When this officer caught Mr. Grey, he found a red, spring-assisted knife in Mr. Grey’s right front pocket. This in violation of Section..blah...blah...blah.
Again, please do not take this personally. As a retired LEO, I’ve filled out MANY affidavits and what you are seeing is NOT everything that is put on it.
I don’t know what happened and I am not defending nor accusing those involved. I just know from experience that there is usually a lot more that will come out that will either convict or exonerate those charged. We are just at the beginning of this case. God help Baltimore when this case is over, regardless of outcome. The riots that occurred earlier will look like a walk in the park later this summer.
I’ll buy that. I don’t claim to be an expert. But I do know that if you prohibit what is commonly known as a switchblade, you have tied yourself to the common definition.
Unless your law then says, “and all other spring-assisted knives.”
Thanks for your thoughtful post.
I just checked The Conservative Treehouse before coming back to this thread, and it appears there is some video footage of Freddy Gray running into and back out of a building just before the police took him down.
You might want to tell us what you make of this video, and the comments about the timeline. It seems to me that he :::might::: have dumped something, but I am just speculating.