

Unharvested corn in Council Bluffs, Iowa. (Nati Harnik/AP)

If you woke up today and thought, “Gosh, I wonder what is up with Iowa, I have not heard all that much about Iowa lately, I hope Iowa’s okay, I should really call Iowa more often,” you are in luck. Because we have news about Iowa and, more specifically, the rights of Iowans to get drunk on their porches.

Here’s the backstory, as related by the Iowa Supreme Court: In 2013, Patience Paye called the police in Waterloo, Iowa, to report domestic violence. When the officers arrived, they spoke to Kendrall Murray, who told them that he and Paye had gotten into an argument over whether Paye could drive the car.

Murray said that he wouldn’t let her drive because she was drunk, and told police that she punched him in the eye. He also said that while grabbing Paye’s arm to keep her from hitting him, he scratched her.

The police went to talk to Paye and said they determined that she was the aggressor in the situation with Murray. They also took a breath sample from her to check out Murray’s comments about Paye being drunk, and two samples showed blood alcohol concentrations of 0.267 and 0.264, respectively.

In Iowa, you’re considered too intoxicated to drive if you have an alcohol level least 0.08, and Paye had more than three times that amount.

But Iowa state law doesn’t just cover drinking and driving. Iowa also has a law against public intoxication, an offense described in the state code as being drunk (or pretending to be drunk) “in a public place.” (They also arrested her for domestic assault, a charge that was later dropped.)

So what, exactly, makes a place public? Iowa’s code says “any place, building or conveyance to which the public has or is permitted access.” Paye was on her front steps when the police arrived — because she had called them, remember — and she argued during her trial that she shouldn’t face the public intoxication charge because she wasn’t drinking in public.

This is how the Iowa Supreme Court describes a photograph of Paye’s home that was submitted as evidence during the trial:

The photograph depicts the front entrance to the residence consisting of several stairs approaching a small rectangular area that can fairly be characterized as an enclosed entryway. Metal hand railings are situated on either side of the stairs, and the stairs are neither enclosed nor covered by a roof or awning. The front yard of the residence is not fenced. On the night in question, there were no signs posted indicating that access to the property was restricted, but there also was no indication Paye had extended a general invitation for access to the public.

However, the district court didn’t buy Paye’s argument that the porch was private, and it determined that her home was public because it was visible to people and anyone could have walked up her front steps. She was found guilty. She appealed, which brings us to the Iowa Supreme Court, who on Friday declared that, yes, you can drink on your front porch in the Hawkeye State.

The Iowa Supreme Court’s decision, written by Justice Daryl L. Hecht, described the issue as “narrow, but important.” If you have a house, and if that house has a porch or front steps, are they considered a public place or a private one?

This issue of public versus private places has been considered with regards to the Fourth Amendment, which prohibits “unreasonable searches and seizures” and plays a major role in how the law treats privacy. The U.S Supreme Court said in its 1967 decision Katz v. United States that “the Fourth Amendment protects people, not places,” an opinion that dealt with constitutionally reasonable expectations of privacy, the idea of where a person can expect privacy and what, in turn, makes a place public versus private.

Since this decision deals with expectations of privacy, rather than the definition of a public place, it is not tremendously relevant here, but it at least touches on the broader issue. Justice John M. Harlan wrote in a concurring opinion that “a man’s home is, for most purposes, a place where he expects privacy.” (Fun fact: Harlan and his grandfather, who served in the late 19th century and early 20th century, are the only two justices in the court’s history to share a name.)

Still, we’re talking about a porch here, a public-facing and visible part of a home, rather than the inside of a house (or, since I brought up Katz, a phone booth). The issue here is not whether Paye had an expectation of privacy, but whether these front steps could be considered public.

Hecht, writing for the Iowa Supreme Court, noted that the steps leading to a single-family home are not the same as, say, steps leading to an apartment building with a bunch of residents or the entrance to a business. People can see Paye’s steps, people can use them to knock and get her to sign a petition “or borrow a cup of sugar” (an example Hecht uses), but that is not the same thing as an open invitation to anyone, the justice wrote. And just because Paye called the police and invited them there, Hecht adds, doesn’t mean that she was inviting anyone there.

Still, digging through the short public-intoxication statute, which also prohibits drinking alcohol in any public place without a liquor license, Hecht wrote about the consequences of interpreting the statute to cover a person’s porch (emphasis Hecht’s):

Thus, if the front stairs of a single-family residence are always a public place, it would be a crime to sit there calmly on a breezy summer day and sip a mojito, celebrate a professional achievement with a mixed drink of choice, or even baste meat on the grill with a bourbon-infused barbeque sauce — unless one first obtained a liquor license. We do not think the legislature intended Iowa law to be so heavy-handed.

And the penalties would not end there, Hecht added:

Additionally, holding the front steps of a single-family home are always a public place would mean any intoxicated person who responsibly secures a ride home from a sober designated driver could be arrested for and convicted of public intoxication because they traversed the stairs of their single-family house while intoxicated.

In the end, the justices determined that Paye’s front stairs are not public and told the lower court to dismiss the charge.