Public Defense

The reasonable man goes to a public place

By Gideon

So in light of my previous post (and the police’s strange contention that a liquor license makes a closed bar a public place), I decided to look up the public indecency statute and figure out what a public place actually means.

Here’s the answer:

I don’t know what the hell the police are talking about.

The public indecency statute, C.G.S. 53a-186, defines public indecency as:

(a) A person is guilty of public indecency when he performs any of the following acts in a public place: (1) An act of sexual intercourse as defined in subdivision (2) of section 53a-65; or (2) a lewd exposure of the body with intent to arouse or to satisfy the sexual desire of the person; or (3) a lewd fondling or caress of the body of another person.

So, having sex in a bar and in the lobby of hotel would probably qualify. The statute also defines “public place”:

For the purposes of this section, “public place” means any place where the conduct may reasonably be expected to be viewed by others.

Ah. The reasonable man would make an appearance here. Is the closed bar of a hotel a place where people may reasonably be excepted to be viewed by others? That’s the question, isn’t it? One can make the argument that no reasonable person would expect to be viewed by non-invitees in an area that is closed to the general public. Or one could argue that a bar and the lobby of a hotel are always places where one should be expected to be viewed by others.

But what does all of this have to do with the liquor license? The state’s control over liquor is in Title 30 of the General Statutes. There’s no mention of “public place”. Not even in the annotations. I will note that whether a location is a public place is a question of fact for the jury to decide.

So I didn’t figure out what the police meant, but I did learn some interesting things. For example, here are the rules on taking a bottle of wine from a restaurant:

A restaurant patron shall be allowed to remove one unsealed bottle of wine for off-premises consumption provided the patron has purchased such bottle of wine at such restaurant and has purchased a full course meal at such restaurant and consumed a portion of the bottle of wine with such meal on such restaurant premises. For the purposes of this section, “full course meal” means a diversified selection of food which ordinarily cannot be consumed without the use of tableware and which cannot be conveniently consumed while standing or walking.

Someone put a lot of thought into it.

What about the mini-bar, you say? There’s gotta be some law about that! And right you are:

(a) A hotel guest bar permit, available to a hotel permittee, shall allow the retail sale of alcoholic liquor located in registered hotel guest rooms. The annual fee for a hotel guest bar permit shall be fifty dollars for each hotel room equipped for the retail sale of alcoholic liquor.

(b) A hotel guest bar shall: (1) Be accessible only by key, magnetic card or similar device provided by the hotel to a registered guest twenty-one years of age or older; and (2) restocked no earlier than nine o’clock a.m. and no later than one o’clock a.m.

So if you go to a hotel room and they come to restock the bar at 8am, you can call them a criminal. Tell ‘em Gideon said so*.

There’s much, much more. Like the non-profit golf tournament permit, or the broker’s permit and the awesome nightclub permit.

*Don’t be daft. Don’t say that.

Full post as published by A Public Defender on December 19, 2008 (boomark / email).