I'm glad we've cleared this up...

Now that summer is here, a lot of my fellow Okies escape the heat by retiring to the shade of the old front porch. This ruling could affect a number of us....:beer:

In a monumentally important decision, the Iowa Supreme Court ruled it is legal to be drunk on your front porch.

The Associated Press is reporting the state’s highest court rendered its decision last week in the case of Patience Paye. In 2011, Paye called police after having a fight with her boyfriend. She met police officers on the front porch of her home in Waterloo. While investigating the domestic assault complaint, an officer asked Paye if she had been drinking. She was given a breath-test and it revealed a blood-alcohol concentration of 0.267 – more than three times the legal limit, if she was driving on public roads.

She was charged and convicted of public intoxication, but appealed the ruling, saying a “front porch” is not a public place. The Supreme Court agreed and ruled that the front steps of a private home is not a public place if the homeowner hasn’t invited the “general public” to be there.

The Supreme Court said that Iowa is among only a few states to criminalize public drunkenness. Some states including Montana, North Carolina and North Dakota specifically prohibit a person from being prosecuted solely for public intoxication. Iowa Attorney General spokesman Geoff Greenwood
said prosecutors “respect the court’s ruling which has a narrow scope in that it addresses intoxication while a person is on the front porch of a single family home.”