I was responding to a couple comments by a few folks on Kate’s site and my comment doesn’t seem to have gone through. I post it here because I worked too damned hard to let it disappear.

The original post was in reference to Riccardo Gino Ferrante’s arrest for peeping in a Tulsa Target. You can check out the post and those links for more details.

This reply is actually for you and for Jeff.

That the judge has decided location is the governing factor in determining privacy is completely, well, disorienting.

Really? You don’t think that your expectations of privacy in, say, your own home are different than, say, at a football stadium during a game? I would say that location has much to do with expectations of privacy.

If I walk around naked in my own home, I have a reasonable expectation that no one is going take and broadcast pictures of my fat ass to the world. If I walk around naked at the stadium during a football game, I’d expect the ridicule that I’ll be receiving and my guess is that you would do the same. If so, then your expectations of reasonable levels of privacy are changed by location.

Now, in this case, it would be reasonable to expect that it would not be legal for someone to bypass your privacy protecting clothing (a skirt or dress or whatever it is that you happen to be wearing) to nab pictures of your undies. That expectation would be changed if, say, you’re Ms. B. Spears and you’re getting out of a car sans underwear, wouldn’t it?

Which leads me to believe that we all have a sort of sliding scale of expectations of privacy that hinge both on place and on the actions of the individual in trying to protect their privacy. What protection the law provides in Oklahoma, though, is still something that I don’t understand.

A slightly longer article that I read had this snippet:

[The] language of the statute “does not presently contemplate” Ferrante’s conduct and that “it is not the province of this Court to enlarge its scope.”

The statute offers examples of where a person would reasonably expect such privacy, including locker rooms, dressing rooms, restrooms and any place of residence, the majority opinion noted.

And then, someone quoted the actual statute in Rachel Lucas’s post on the subject:

“Every person who hides, waits or otherwise loiters in the vicinity of any private dwelling house, apartment building, any other place of residence, or in the vicinity of any locker room, dressing room, restroom or any other place where a person has a right to a reasonable expectation of privacy, with the unlawful and willful intent to watch, gaze, or look upon any person in a clandestine manner”

I’d say that’s either a bad law or a bad law to have tried to shoehorn this offense into. Can you safely define underneath the skirt as a place in the context of the other places listed here? I think that’s a tough stretch, although my inclination would have been to say “yes.” Going back to the Britney Spears thought, though, is her skirt a “place” where she can reasonably expect privacy?

My points: First, that it might not be as bad a decision as it looks like at first blush and other states should look at their own statutes to see what loopholes like this exist so that they can close them. Second, that the judges didn’t decide that people inside Wal-Mart or Target had a different expectations of privacy than a person “on the sidewalk three steps outside their front door.” The post misleads a little bit especially inasmuch as this decision only effects people in Oklahoma--other state laws will differ. It has nothing to do with Target, really, and even less to do with Wal-Mart, although the post makes it seem as if it does.

I’m guessing that I violated some rule about the html that can be placed in her comments. Sorry about that.