A letter to Ms. Love reporting the denial was signed by Lieutenant Merrill Messick. In separate correspondence, Messick instructed the dealer not to sell Ms. Love the handgun. The Maryland Code lists several grounds for denying an application, but a prior arrest is not such a ground. The court ordered the state police to approve her application. The defendants moved to dismiss, and the district court granted the motion.
Love asserts only a substantive due process claim.
Any significant discretion conferred upon the local agency defeats the claim of a property interest. The police have the power to deny the application only if it is incomplete or any information on it is false. Irrationality and arbitrariness imply a most stringent standard against which state action is to be measured in assessing a substantive due process claim. Though their acts apparently violated state law, these police officers were forced by the extreme time constraints to streamline investigations. They erred on the side of caution by denying applications where a computer check showed arrests with unknown dispositions.