Today I was gawking at somebody’s fancy Jaguar convertible parked in the parking lot at Best Buy. I was literally standing there staring at the instrument panel, etc. for a good five minutes. Which got me to wondering…
In Joplin, MO there is a hill where, if you drive your car at just the right speed and you look in just the right direction at just the right moment, you can see right into a women’s restroom thru the exhaust vents (I guess the builder either didn’t do the math quite right or figured no one would notice). Now, I know that there are plenty of deves out there who would get off on watching women do their business. So, suppose some deve figures out the angles and sets up shop on a tree limb with a pair of binoculars at the public park right across the street. Apart from drawing the ire of just about every moral and decent person who figured out what he was up to, could this guy be charged with a crime? The only thing that comes to mind is trespassing; hence the title of this thread.
Like if your neighbor was undressing in front of her window? My neighbor when I was growing up used to host female asian exchange students who like to sit around in their room naked. Asian thing?
Nope, not a crime. If you lived in a completely glass house you could even be arrested for indescent exposure. I think there are also varying degrees of “peeping tom-ness”. If you were hanging from a limb in front of somebodies house in a George McFly fashion, I think you could be charged with trespassing, but if you were just looking into your neighbors window I should think not.
Actually, it reminds me of the joke about the girl going to visit her elderly aunt at her new home. She asks, “How do you like your new house, Aunt Edna?”
“I don’t like it at all! You can see the young man next door getting changed!”
“But your windows are too high to see the neighbours.”
“Just you stand on that table!”
In a similar vein, as a postal worker in Australia, if I read the contents of a postcard while it is in transit, I can be charged with “tampering with Her Majesty’s mail”.
I’m not sure exactly what is covered by that word “about”, as in “on or about the premises”. That sounds to me like you couldn’t beat a “Peeping Tom” rap by standing one foot over the property line, but I am not a lawyer. And what about the person who has giant plate glass windows that face out onto a busy street, and who habitually lounges around nekkid? Possibly that person could be busted for public indecency; again, I don’t know.
Again, how are “private place” and “out of public view” defined? From the same section we have “[It shall be unlawful for] Any person to go on or about the premises of another or any private place, except as otherwise provided by law, for the purpose of invading the privacy of others by eavesdropping upon their conversations or secretly observing their activities”; again, that word “about”.
