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You Can Pull Your Pants Down in Maryland!
Ah America, where you're free to let your buttocks hang out in the breeze.
A Montgomery County Circuit Court judge ruled Tuesday that, while not tasteful, mooning someone in Maryland is not illegal, according to The Washington Post.
The decision acquitted a Germantown man who bared his buttocks during a fight with his neighbor, reversing the earlier guilty of indecent exposure verdict of a district court judge.
"If exposure of half of the buttock constituted indecent exposure, any woman wearing a thong at the beach at Ocean City would be guilty," Judge John W. Debelius III said following the trial.
Saying that the alleged butt-bearing was undeniably "disgusting" and "demeaning," Debelius said if the defendant had been on trial for "being a jerk" his ruling might have gone the other way.
The defendant, Raymond Hugh McNealy, 44, allegedly yelled at neighbor Nanette Vonfeldt on June 7 and threatened to "blow up" her building as she and her 8-year-old daughter walked out of their apartment.
"Then, for whatever reason, in full view of my daughter, he mooned us," Vonfeldt wrote in court papers.
McNealy's attorneys said the two had been arguing for a while about disagreements over their homeowners association and McNealy wanted Vonfeldt kicked off the board.
Montgomery District Court Judge Eugene Wolfe got the case first on Sept. 12 and ruled against the alleged butt-bearer — whose attorneys appealed the decision, saying indecent exposure in Maryland is a willful public exposing of "private parts," not buttocks.
A $1,000 fine and up to three years in prison is the punishment for indecent exposure in Maryland.
The indecent exposure law in the state is ambiguous, Montgomery County prosecutor Dan Barnett told The Washington Post.
"In our minds, this was not a bathing suit scenario," Barnett told the Post. "This was a grown man exposing himself to an 8-year-old girl."
The case of a female protester arrested in 1983 demonstrating outside the Supreme Court in nothing but a sign covering the front of her body was cited by the defense. "Indecent exposure" is limited to a person's genitals, the D.C. Court of Appeals later ruled in 1986.
James Maxwell, one of McNealy's attorneys, told the Post the ruling should "bring comfort to all beachgoers and plumbers" in Maryland.