As I was going to St. Ides
I met a man with seven brides
which led him to sheepishly admit
“I really shouldn’t drink this shit”.
No, each community is different. Last time I checked, it was legal to drink in public in Las Vegas and New Orleans.
In NYC drinking in public gets you a $25 fine. Normally not much money, however you are required to go down to the courthouse and either pay it or appeal it.
Some friends of mine in law school bought some and tried it. They took one drink each, set it down on the kitchen table, and didn’t touch it again for a week. It was completely undrinkable, but they said it made the apartment smell nice and minty.
A friend of mine was arrested for DUI because he was sitting in his car in the driveway of his house drinking a beer and listening to the radio (because his wife said she was sick of listening to the ball game or whatever it was). He didn’t get convicted but he had to spend $$$ for a lawyer…nice.
Because there’s no evidence that a law is being broken. Paper bag isn’t prima facie. Just because we all assume that it’s alcohol doesn’t make it so. It could just as well be Gatorade. It’s not about letting people break the law or not, it’s about preserving personal rights, about limiting the ability of the police to do whatever the hell they want to do without regard to Constitutional rights. Once you have the habit of abusing rights – even for the little stuff – it gets that much easier to start abusing the larger stuff. I’m not arguing that some drunk ought not get fined for his open container.
The base question, then, is given no other suspicious behavior, no reports of perps in the area matching your description, id est, the only possible reason you could potentially be attracting police attention is the fact that you’re drinking a Pepsi out of a paper bag. You can refuse the request for a voluntary search, in which case the officer needs reasonable suspicion to search you. So, is paper bag enough to justify his non-voluntary registration of your person? Like many of the previous responses to this most basic of civil liberties questions, you may answer that the cop will come up with a reason. See the problem here? He’s got to invent stuff just to be able to peek inside your bag.
Nobody bats an eye if you walk around with a big insulated mug marked with the name of a Kwik-E-Mart. That beats a brown paper bag.
Balthisar’s typo “probably cause,” adds to my list of subtle joke phrases. 
Thanks, Balthisar!
You are missing the essential point here, I think. As an officer, I don’t have to have the evidence needed to convict you to search you. Similarly, I don’t have to have the evidence to search you to stop you and investigate what you are doing. You may well be doing something innocent in matter of fact. But, as we’ve established, since the vast majority of people who drink out of a container hidden in a bag are drinking out of an open container of alcohol, we’d have to concede that the officer would have a reasonable suspicion of illegal activity. Note the emphasized word. Suspicion is not the same as knowledge, or even likely knowledge.
So, for example, you are outside a jewelry store. You walk by the front a few times, peering into the store’s windows. You hang around outside the store’s entrance. You look around nervously. You look in the direction of an officer of the law, and appear startled and rattled.
The officer forms the reasonable suspicion that you are casing the joint, preperatory to robbing it. He decides to stop you and investigate. His stop would likely be upheld on these facts by a court as reasonable under Terry. But, in matter of fact, you weren’t casing the joint; you were waiting for your girlfriend, who is married to someone else, to come out of the store and you were startled not by seeing the officer, but rather by seeing someone just behind the officer who appeared to be her husband. Nothing illegal.
So, in short, we don’t require that you be doing illegal things on the face of it to form the suspicion that you are intending to do something illegal, or are doing something illegal in fact, or have done something illegal. Drinking out of a container hidden in a brown paper bag is worth the investigation to make sure that you are not drinking from an open container.
Not that I don’t believe you, as DC police are known for dumbassedness, but do you have a cite for this? I often hang out on my front porch with a beer, and I wouldn’t much like it if a cop came along and started giving me a hard time.
I knew someone who got arrested for sitting on his porch drunk. He wasn’t creating a disturbance, but the cop wanted to arrest him and he stumbled when he got up to greet the cop(exhibited signs of intoxication in public) and gave the cop probable cause to arrest.
This happened in New Orleans. As Shagnasty said earlier, New Orleans had laws allowing 18 year olds to drink up until about 15 years ago and you can walk down the street with a visible open container, and until not long ago, you could even drink beer while operating a motor vehicle, but public intoxication is illegal, though rarely enforced.
He hired a lawyer and tried to get off the charges but ended up being sentenced to 30 days in jail (suspended) and a couple hundred-dollar fine.
Sure, here’s a link from a DC blog about it: Bottoms Up, May 20, 2001 but if you search for Washington chardonnay lady you kind find other stories about the incident. IIRC it made it’s way to the WaPo. Here is a quote from the above link:
I always thought a ginger ale bottle would be a good container for beer.
Vodka. No odor.
The rum smell might give you away otherwise.
As far as I can tell, it is not illegal to drink in public in Houston, Texas. It would be interesting to see data on laws throughout the country.
Of course, there are exceptions. No drinking alcohol at transit stops. (And you can’t drink, eat or smoke anything while riding a bus or light rail.) Alcohol can’t be sold within a certain distance of schools–so I wouldn’t drink within that area. Last time I went to a concert at the park, the only rule was: No glass containers. There are laws against public drunkenness.
After getting off the bus on a hot afternoon, I’ve been known to buy a can of beer at the convenience store for the walk home. The guy puts the can in a can-sized bag, which keeps the slippery can from slipping from my hand. (No, I don’t feel like a degenerate.)
And parts of Texas are dry: So no alcohol should be sold, bought or seen in public.
By a bizarre set of circumstances, a friend of mine recieved TWO DUIs in the same night from two separate townships.
That is not as uncommon as one would think. Many people are still under the influence when they make bail or get released on their own recognizance or the first thing they do is hit a liquor store, then they go to get their car from the impound lot and right after they drive off, the attendant calls the cops and reports them. Bingo, two DUI’s in the same day…
The funniest thing I saw was a guy showed up to his court date for a DUI, drunk off his ass, the judge had him arrested for being drunk in public (actually it was because he was being a complete asshole but that is not one of the options in the penal code) as he was being handcuffed he whined to the judge about his car being left unattended in the parking lot if he got arrested. The DA asked him if somebody could drive it home for him and he said that no, he had driven to court alone, so the DA added a DUI charge and had the guys car towed for him…D’oh.