There is a tree in Athens, GA that owns itself. And all the land within 8 feet of it’s base. The article is rather interesting just for the oddness of it all. Especially in light of the general strictness of most property laws and claims. One of my favorite pieces of interplay between official law and law as people actually deal with it:
Athens-Clarke County confirms that the tree is in the right-of-way and is thus “accepted for care” by municipal authorities; according to city-county officials, local government and the owners of the adjacent property jointly serve as “stewards” for the care of the tree, while Athens’ Junior Ladies’ Garden Club serves as its “primary advocate.” Regarding Jackson’s deed, one writer noted at the turn of the last century, “However defective this title may be in law, the public recognized it.” In that spirit, it is the stated position of the Athens-Clarke County unified government that the tree, in spite of the law, does indeed own itself.
My question then, is what the tree does for a living to pay the property taxes on itself?
(Note, the point of this post is well towards the end, but I got on a rant that I’ve been meaning to post for a while, and it got a little out of hand, skip to the end if you’re in a hurry, read it all if you’d like more of a laugh.)
When I first moved to Minnesota from Iowa, I had a jolting experience. I was out of beer and wanted to go pick some up. I went to a liquor store. It was closed. So, I went to another, which was also closed. So, I went to a grocery store, but I couldn’t find the beer section. I asked someone at the check out. They said they didn’t sell beer there. So, I went to a gas station. By this point I was pretty annoyed, but was happy to find that they did have beer. Though the cooler was locked (with a bike lock around the handle to the shelf inside, thus forcing the door to the cooler to stay open – not really important to the story, but it seemed weird to me at the time). So, I asked the girl at the counter. She mumbled something to the effect of “isthreetwo.”
“Um, yeah, a twelve pack of Budweiser if you have it.”
“Yaknowisthreetwo?”
“Um, sure.”
So, I got back to my apartment that Sunday evening (oh, did I mention that it was Sunday?) and searched online to figure out what this, “three two,” was that the clerk was referring to as I was drinking my beer, which didn’t seem quite right. I found that when it comes to liquor laws, I’ve practically moved to Utah. You can’t buy alcohol on Sunday. You can’t buy alcohol at any place that sells groceries. But you can sell beer that is 3.2% alcohol or less at a gas station on Sunday to unsuspecting recent transplants, which is a cruel joke which made me think about moving back to Iowa if that’s the kind of thing they pull up here. (deep breath)
Now, as often happens when you have ridiculous laws, there are ridiculous workarounds. So, a grocery store can’t sell alcohol, right? Well, you can have two stores set up next to each other, in the same building even, sharing a glass wall and a name, one selling groceries, and the other selling alcohol, as long as the check outs are separate and there’s a solid wall or a space between them (I think).
For instance, Trader Joe’s (awesome) in St. Louis Park has a Trader Joe’s grocery store, and five feet away they have a Trader Joe’s beer and wine store. Seen here, Trader Joe’s sign to the left = liquor store, Trader Joe’s sign to the right = grocery store. Legal.
But still, no alcohol on Sunday, no matter how many doors you have.
Because Jesus rose from the dead that day, and separation of church and state is strong here on the frozen tundra.
Wait, scratch that.
No alcohol sales on Sunday, because it’s the 102,804th seven day anniversary of the day that the Catholic church picked arbitrarily / symbolically many, many years after the event to commemorate Jesus rising from the dead, not to mention making a symbolic break from Judaism’s Sabbath, while still coinciding with pagan rebirth/fertility celebrations. Can’t you at least stock pile alcohol on Saturday for that?!?!?! Screw separation of church and state, Jesus became a freaking zombie for your sins – buy alcohol on Saturday, not Sunday. Isn’t the link obvious? I mean, if you’re really a heathen, you can drive to Wisconsin if you forgot to stock up on Saturday. They sell beer on Sundays there (sinners!!!). At gas stations (blaspheme!!!). With only one door. Insanity, I know.
It’s even in the Bible, and, apparently, therefore the Constitution. Ah yes, in Matthew 3: mumblemumblemumble it says:
After my death, the Norwegians shall go forth from their homelands and settle in a far off place. They shall govern an area roughly bounded by the Red River, the St Croix River, the Mississippi River, Lake Superior, 43° 34′N Latitude, and variety of lakes near Canada. There, from roughly one thousand, nine-hundred years after my death, for at least 90 years, they shall prohibit the sale, but not consumption, of any fermented liquids on the day of the week on which I rise from the dead.
Upon hearing this, the apostles were uneasy. “You’re not going to eat our brains, are you?” they said unto him. And Jesus walked up a mountain.
</rant>
But really people, there’s not much of anything that will make me say Wisconsin is better than anywhere else (as both an Iowan and a Minnesotan (still doesn’t feel right calling myself that), I’m obligated to make fun of Wisconsin where ever convenient), but this will make me say it. Wisconsin is better than Minnesota on liquor sales laws.
The important part:
With the economy in the toilet, the state government’s budget is also going to crap. Minnesota has a very “progressive” (hate that term) tax code, which lends itself making the state government being flush with money in good times, and massively in the hole on downturns. So, law makers are looking for places to fill the holes. And where do you get money? Tax sin goods.
There is now a bill in the Minnesota legislature to allow alcohol sales on Sunday in Minnesota.
It’s to allow alcohol sales on Sunday, and give the tax revenue to child social service. Won’t you think of the children. You don’t hate children, do you? Needy children at that. Not supporting alcohol sales on Sunday in Minnesota is the equivalent of kicking an orphan in the face. There, I said it.
Now find your representatives and let them know that you want to be able to buy beer on Sunday, or this could be Minnesota’s future, forever:
As Metblogs and WCCO have mentioned, there are several laws that apply to driving in the winter in Minnesota, especially in regard to snow. Specifically, they both point to Minnesota Statute, Chapter 169.42, Subdivision 1:
No person shall throw, deposit, place, or dump, or cause to be thrown, deposited, placed, or dumped upon any street or highway or upon any public or privately owned land adjacent thereto without the owner’s consent any snow, ice, glass bottle, glass, nails, tacks, wire, cans, garbage, swill, papers, ashes, cigarette filters, debris from fireworks, refuse, carcass of any dead animal, offal, trash or rubbish or any other form of offensive matter, or any other substance likely to injure any person, animal, or vehicle upon any such street or highway.
Metblogs and WCCO both point out that this means that you have to clean off your vehicle before driving so you don’t have snow/ice fly off of your car and on to the street. However, I’d note something else if we’re to follow the letter of the law. This means that if you park your car on the street, you can’t brush snow off of it there, and you can’t move the car in any way that would cause snow to come off of it, because cleaning off your parked car would deposit snow and ice on the street, which is illegal. The side of the street, yes, but the street none the less.
So, in order to behave legally, if you park your car on the street in Minnesota, and it snows, you need to collect all snow and ice off of your car, not letting any of it fall on the street or adjacent publicly owned land, and transport it to a privately owned location, with consent of the owner of that privately owned location. Also, it says “any snow, ice”, which means that if you cause even a single flake to fall on the pavement, you’re a criminal.
While we’re at it, new word for me in that law: offal. According to Wikipedia, “Offal is the entrails and internal organs of a butchered animal. The word does not refer to a particular list of organs, but includes most internal organs other than muscles or bones.” Apparently offal dumping must have been a problem at some point to get this into law.
So remember- snowflakes, animal entrails, and cheap booze (swill is mentioned) are equally offensive in the eyes of the law. Apparently, the dumping of good booze is fine, since it’s not offensive (my general definition of good booze vs swill), and dumping it is out is not “likely to injure any person, animal, or vehicle”, and, in fact, may prevent such injury. Though I am in no way advocating the pouring out of good booze in the streets. The proper disposal method of unwanted good booze is to give it to the blogger who first introduced you to the word offal. It the law. Maybe.
Even more random aside- the Wikipedia article on offal is actually full of random gems, such as:
“Fries” is a term used in Europe to reference testicles as a food dish.
“Faggot”, in addition to being a bundle of sticks and derogatory term in the US, is a British meatball commonly made of pork offal.
Italians like to eat brains, among other disturbing things.
The liver of the polar bear is unsafe to eat because it is very high in vitamin A.
So, it looks like the legal wrangling associated with the Larry Craig in the airport bathroom case is coming to an end. Remember, that bit of news gone national making Minnesota look bad in 2008, aside from riots at the RNC, and possibly electing Stuart Smally to the Senate (still not final because we still can’t get enough people to take off their gloves and boots to properly finish the recount apparently, or some toes have frozen off (the forecasted low for tonight is 15 below) causing the numbers to shift, or something).
The one interesting part of the Larry Craig case (at least to me anyway), was the legal defense made by the ACLU was trying to defend him on the basis that his invitation for sex to the undercover police officer was protected as free speech. That, in and of itself is old news. But there’s one detail of the case in this article over at MinnPost of which I was unaware:
Finally, the ACLU maintains that Craig allegedly invited Karsnia to engage in conduct which is not, in itself, a crime. The brief states that if Craig’s invitation was to have sex in a restroom stall, then that conduct would be protected under State v. Bryant, a 1970 Minnesota Supreme Court decision which holds that “individuals who engage in sex in closed stalls in public restrooms have a reasonable expectation of privacy.”
Is it just me, or is that a really unusual Supreme Court case? Later in the article:
Also, attorneys for the state contend that Craig’s reach under the stall was not covered by the State v. Bryant case, since Craig’s body intruded into another stall, and was not confined to the one that he occupied, where he had a reasonable expectation of privacy under the Bryant decision.
Oral arguments in the State of Minnesota v. Larry Edwin Craig case will be heard at 9 a.m. today at the Minnesota Judicial Center.
(Author exercises great restraint in not making an “Oral arguments” crack, even though MinnPost put that in the last line of their article, which could kind of leave a bad taste in…, oh nevermind.) So, yes, there was actually a case in 1970 that went all the way to the Minnesota Supreme Court on how much privacy you can expect while having sex in a public restroom.
After a little digging, I found this rather lengthy article on sodomy laws, which gives the case more context:
The first non-unanimous sodomy decision by the Court was the 1970 case of State v. Bryant. A bitterly divided 4-3 decision overturned the conviction of a man arrested in a department store restroom. The store suspected that sexual relations were taking place in the restroom after the security supervisor, David Imire, discovered a glory hole cut between two stalls. Imire and a police officer then stationed themselves in the roof, looking down on the stalls, which led to the arrest of Bryant for making use of the glory hole. After noting other court decisions concerning the same issue, which led to the reversal of convictions for violations of privacy, Chief Justice Oscar Knutson, writing for the majority, stated that
once the store provided facilities of such a nature that the user was assured of privacy, it could not destroy that privacy by giving its consent to secret surveillance by police.
In dissent, Justice Robert Sheran, who resigned shortly after the decision was announced, stated that his disagreement consisted “only” of the fact that
persons who use places of this kind for illegal activities which subvert the object of the owner’s invitation should not be allowed to shield their perversions by appealing to the court’s proper concern for the rights of others not involved in the prosecution.
Law is such an odd thing. So, from what I can tell from all of that, according to Minnesota law, though it’s probably illegal to have sex in a public restroom (I assume, didn’t look that one up), you can legally expect privacy while doing so, so long as no parts of anyone involved leave the stall. Also, no one can spy on you to see if you are having sex in a public restroom, though I would assume that if the fact that that is taking place is apparent to anyone outside the stall, the police would probably have probable cause to investigate. No idea where all that would then fit in with indecent exposure laws if an officer opened the stall door (making a legally private space public), obscenity laws, or (god help us all) health codes.
I’d just like to reiterate, law is such a weird field.
So after an incredibly dull and unrewarding day at work today, I was walking from the office to the bus downtown tonight. I see two people coming running around the corner on the cross street at the end of the block I’m on. One runs across the street, the other down the block towards me. The cross street they came from is a pretty main bus route, so it makes sense for someone to be running for a bus along that street, but the street I’m on has almost no buses, and even if it did, the person running towards me wouldn’t have been able to see one to run towards it.
It strikes me as odd that two people would both round that corner, running hard, at almost the same moment, but go different directions, and at least one of them not running for a bus. What makes people in the city run (who in what are quite obviously not running clothes) other than running for a bus? Well, being chased is about it. This whole thought process takes about 2 seconds. Sure enough, a cop and a gentleman (whom I can only assume is a witness/victim) come running around the corner after them, and follow the one on my side of the street. The cop and the gentleman are both running, but the person running towards me (I can see now it’s a woman, maybe mid to late 20’s) looks a little faster than them from my roughly one second of observing their relative paces and evaluating overall pace differentials and agility.
So then it occurs to me.
I have a chance to legally open field tackle someone on the street, and as an added bonus, they know a cop is almost there anyway so I can be reasonably confident I won’t get stabbed or shot- I get to be a good Samaritan / Spider-Man preventing the Uncle Ben’s death, and tackle someone in the process. This is already the high point of my day. Awesome.
For a moment I envision a full speed BCS Championship Game style juke move followed by a leaping swinging high arm tackle / clothesline. I drop into the standard linebacker pose – a slight squat, shoulders squared, arms out to about a 45 degree angle, eyes on target. While I’m wearing business casual and a messenger bag. It occurs to me I watch too much football.
If you don’t know me and I haven’t mentioned it elsewhere, it would probably be helpful to mention at this point that I’m male, about 6′3″ and 225lbs, and reasonably athletic. Not something I think of daily, but apparently me in a football stance with an obvious intent to tackle you is rather intimidating. It also doesn’t occur to me daily how much bigger I am than most people so it’s a brief second before I realize what an uneven match up this is.
The girl keeps running and attempts to knock into me and get past. However, given the size differential, it’s a pretty feeble attempt. Plus, she doesn’t really try to go around me, but more through. She runs basically straight in to me, and more or less bounces straight back off. I guess she thought I was going to leap out of the way at the last second or something. She tries again, this time trying to go slightly around me. I wrap one arm around her shoulders, which is more than enough to stop her. At this point it seems to dawn on her how much bigger I am than her as well, and that she’s not getting past. I unwrap my arm and just stand in front of her. She berates me briefly and the cop and the gentleman finally catch up. They are that much slower. At this point it was flagrantly obvious the cop would not have caught up with the lady on his own. She ran into me twice, and told me off, in the amount of distance she got on them in one block.
The cop hands a pair of handcuffs to the gentleman and tells him to arrest the woman. It occurs to me that he probably saw whatever it was illegal that they did, and therefore can/should make a citizen’s arrest. As a side note, if an officer isn’t present for a crime, technically, they shouldn’t arrest the person if it’s a minor offense, and will often ask the main witnesses to make a citizen’s arrest, which the witness can do because they witnessed the crime. (I actually read this article on citizen’s arrests in Minnesota a couple weeks ago, which fit nicely with this evening’s events.)
The cop then set off at a light jog (perhaps a run for him) after the other runner, who had (criminals are dumb) upon splitting up with the woman, chosen to run down the other side of the same street, going the same direction, towards a traffic cop in an intersection. I’m not sure if the cop caught up with the guy, or if the traffic cop got involved. The gentleman was a similar build to me, and seemed to have this whole arresting thing well under control, so I shrugged my shoulders and kept walking to my bus. This all took perhaps 10 or 15 seconds.
I mention this not to brag or anything, but for the following reasons:
It’s really random and kind of entertaining.
It’s not often that being a fairly big guy or being in reasonably good shape comes in handy in civil society outside of helping people move, so it’s kind of nice when it does.
The cop made absolutely, positively no show of appreciation for the help in stopping someone who was apparently worth chasing and arresting, and who would have obviously gotten away otherwise. No “thanks”, not even a half second of eye contact and a slight head nod. He acted exactly as if the girl had run into a light pole and couldn’t figure out how to get around it. I suppose from a legal stand point, the tackling of strangers on the street when you didn’t even witness the crime isn’t something they probably want to encourage, and he was a bit distracted with the other runner, but it still struck me as odd that at no point did he in any way even acknowledge my presence.
So, then when I got off the bus tonight after this (again, I mention not to brag, but for the coincidence and how much things go in streaks), I walked about a half block and there was a truck trying to get out of a parking spot on the side of the street, and was really, really stuck on some ice, and spinning their tires trying to get it out. So, laughing a bit, I went over and help push them out. (A guy who I had just passed walking went past this, saw that I went to help, then stopped and came back to help too.) After a couple of good shoves, the truck got some traction and pulled out. In shear contrast to the cop and the amount of effort / personal risk expended in both situations, the girl driving the truck turned around at the next intersection so she could come back and thank us both enthusiastically, and looked absolutely ecstatic that someone, in fact two someones, stopped to help.
A potential multiple choice question for becoming a Minneapolis Police Officer:
It’s 3 degrees out and snowing. It has been brutally cold for several days. While driving along a narrow residential side street in your squad car, you come across a small SUV double parked in the street. It has signs on it that say “Auto Rescue: Tires Changed, Jump Starts, Lock Services”. It is parked next to a small legally parked car with it’s hood open. There are two people standing in front of the car, one holding jumper cables. You should:
A) Park in the open spot 3 car lengths back, get out, and see if you can help jump start the car.
B) Pull up behind the SUV and put your lights on so no one hits them. Help to direct traffic around the SUV while the one lane is blocked to keep traffic flowing.
C) Park your squad car in the middle of the street, so it will block traffic coming from both directions instead of just one. Stay in the warm car. Announce over your car’s speakers that the SUV driver needs to move their vehicle because they are blocking traffic. If the stranded motorist yells back that the SUV driver is giving her a jump start, repeat over the speaker that they need to move their vehicle because they are blocking traffic. Note that no cars have pulled up behind you, in the lane that was already blocked by the SUV, though there are 3 cars now backed up in the oncoming lane, which only you are blocking.
D) A and B.
30 seconds. Think it over. As I saw tonight, the answer is apparently C. Yes, that’s right C. And they’re lucky you didn’t give them a ticket for being double parked. Actually, he may have, I had walked further on by that point.
While we’re ripping on the Minneapolis police, on a more serious note, we’ve had a string of at least 10 violent, armed robberies on a main bicycle/running/walking thoroughfare recently. And the police didn’t make any statement about this until there were 10 of them. No warnings, no reaction at all. People I know who work at a local running store, and bike on the route in question all the time hadn’t even heard about it. (The following bit largely echos the sentiment of this post on The Deets.) Then the police did finally issue a warning. And it’s every bit as absurd as one might expect. Do they give a description of the attackers? Not really. Three young males, that’s about it. What is their first bit of advice? Tell people to avoid going out after dark. This trail is a main route for bicycle commuters. Dark in Minnesota in the winter comes at about 4:30pm. The work day ends at 5:00pm. Anyone else see an issue here?
Another bit of advice from the police: “Pay attention to your surroundings. If you see people ahead of you, that make you nervous or uncomfortable, exit the Greenway at the nearest ramp.” Apparently the police have never been on the Greenway (which would explain a lot). There are very, very few entry/exit points. It’s down in a hole that used to be a rail line, with bridges over it every block. The sides are pretty much shear brick walls at several points. There are several places where there’s no entry/exit for a least a quarter mile, and one I can think of off the top of my head that’s closer to a half mile. (I hate running on the Greenway for just this reason, and avoid it even when there isn’t crime for this reason. There’s also no water stops, but that’s another rant.)
Well, at least they tell the exact location of the attacks so people know where to watch out, right? Nope. “…on the Midtown Greenway. They’ve occurred in both the 3rd and 5th Precincts at different locations along the trail.” All of the Midtown Greenway that is in the city of Minneapolis is in the 3rd and 5th Precincts. It’s 5 miles long and spans the entire city, from one side to the other:
Not that a big group of bikers all biking together one time really does much. I would think something like a “riding buddy” program would do more, so people don’t have to ride alone.
Or have a regular police patrol or something. There’s a good 10-15 cops standing in the intersections down town “directing traffic” every night during rush hour. And by “directing traffic”, I mean standing in the middle of busy intersections waving their arms and blowing their whistles, telling drivers to do exactly what the traffic signals are already telling them. Absolutely, 100%, exactly what the stop lights are already doing. Except making people more nervous because there’s a cop waving his arms and blowing a whistle that you have to drive around in addition to the usual traffic and pedestrians. Why not put a couple of them on bikes and run them up and down the Greenway in a loop. They might not stop anything in progress, but being there, and on bikes, would at least show a good faith effort, and allow them to respond faster so there would be a better chance of catching the people doing this.
Generally when people lose faith in the police and try to police themselves, it doesn’t end well.
This site is a shameless advertisement for a book, but entertaining none the less. Two guys travel across the country, for the sole purpose of break absurd laws, such as:
Drinking beer from a bucket is illegal in St. Louis
Whale hunting is illegal in Utah
Fishing in your pajamas is illegal in Chicago
They have pictures of many of their law breaking activities.
There is a whole site dedicated dumb laws here, though they don’t have citations of where one can find these laws, so the accuracy is questionable.
This leads me to a question I’ve had for a long, long time. Where can I find “the law”? Really. What is legal and what is illegal? Basically every law I know, I know because someone told me, and they know because someone told them, and so on (with the exception of traffic laws, which the DOT puts out quite pleasant and clear books about). Is there any place you can actually find all the laws that are governing you at any point? How can you obey the laws when you don’t know what they are? And pleading ignorance is never a valid defense – you’re legally obligated to know the laws, but you can’t find where “the laws” are to know them to obey them.
Especially with all the different layers of laws -international laws, federal laws, state laws, county laws (pretty sure there are county laws), and city laws. And which take precedence in any given situation, especially if they contradict one another? And what about “temporary” laws, such as the exception Minneapolis and St Paul will be having to the 2:00 am bar close law for the RNC.
For another example, I know that it’s illegal to drink alcohol in public, and you can get ticketed for it, and I’ve seen this one enforced on many occasions. However, there also seems to be exceptions, such as tailgating before sporting events, or restaurants that have sidewalk cafes and serve alcohol, or while you’re in any sort of watercraft but not driving said watercraft. I would think maybe you can drink on private property that is in public view, but not on government owned property (sidewalks for instance), but this doesn’t fit with tailgating at college football games, which usually takes place on parking lots owned by the college, which is owned by the state.
