A registered nurse and fourth-year med student got a no-jail, misdemeanor deal today for the Tennessee-registered gun she tried to check at the 9/11 Memorial in December.
Manhattan prosecutors this morning dropped the felony gun possession charges Meredith Graves had originally been slammed with — charges carrying a mandatory minimum of 3 1/2 years prison.
Graves pleaded guilty instead to a misdemeanor weapons possession charge, a move that she hopes will save both her gun license and pending medical license, said her lawyer, Daniel Horwitz.
“We’re hoping that wherever she ends up practicing, this is the kind of disposition where licensing boards have a lot of discretion,” Horwitz said.
“She’s happy that this ordeal is over and she’s looking forward to getting on with her life and her career as a doctor,” he said. Graves graduates in May from a Knoxville-based medical school, he said.
It was all just an innocent mistake, the lawyer said. Graves had come to New York on a job interview, and realized she had her small, .22-cal. handgun on her once she stopped by the memorial to pay her respects.
“It was completely inadvertent,” the lawyer said. “She lives a very hectic life,” as a doctor in training, “working nights and then mornings. Somehow, the bag got packed, and the gun was in there.”
States including Tennessee and Michigan don’t even consider an out-of-state, registered weapons rap to be a crime, he said.
Graves’ arrest was the first in a string of gun possession arrests of travelers bringing their home-state-registered guns into the city. It is illegal to possess a gun in New York that is not actually registered in New York.
The case of Ryan Jerome, an Indiana-based jeweler who had been summary court-martialed by the Marines in 2005, sparked a nationwide Marine letter-writing campaign urging that his own gun possession charges be dropped entirely. Jerome had tried to check his Indiana-registered gun at the Empire State Building.
Prosecutors have offered Jerome the same misdemeanor, no-jail deal they are giving Graves; he has so far rejected the offer.