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Comment by SR2Z | Hacker News Reader

To be very fair, I do not know a single person who has ever been charged with this. I and all my friends drink in the park all the time and the cops don't seem to care. If I get on a crowded bus, odds are good that there's a homeless man with a brown paper bag.

This law is probably only enforced against businesses selling booze or people who are being a nuisance.

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One problem with this is that it now ends up being at the discretion of the officer to decide whether to charge you, so it is up to their biases and beliefs whether you are indeed “friends drinking in a park” or “being a nuisance”.

Might surprise you but it affects minorities the most and a common excuse for an officer to probe them for possibly worse crimes.

That’s what “people who are being a nuisance” means.

Did you mean to equate minorities with “people who are being a nuisance?”

No, I mean to say that police equate them.

I am a minority, and my friends are different minorities. It probably varies from place to place but this law is vestigial for us.

> I do not know a single person who has ever been charged with this.

My parents were charged with this soon after coming to the US - they brought a bottle of wine to a barbecue at a public park; the bottle wasn't even kept in view, but presumably some busybody still noticed and called the police.

Having unenforced laws on the books ought to be considered like a “dead code” bad smell. And this dead thing reeks. As others have mentioned, selective enforcement falls on whoever the cops feel like hassling.

They are considered that, but people are lazy and, at most, will leave a quip about it on an Internet forum, but certainly won't put in the effort to clean up where there is no apparent consequences to leaving the status quo intact.

Well in the case of drinking there is a spectrum of acceptable behavior an observer would clearly determine but a law would struggle to formally define. You could say your drinking shouldn’t be a “nuisance” in the law but that is just as subjective as the current situation.

The difference is that crimes such as disorderly conduct are subjective not just for police, but also for juries. It's not perfect, but twelve people agree that you were causing trouble at a level that rises to criminality, there's a good chance there's something to it. With open container laws, it's only subjective for the police. Once you're charged, then all they have to prove about your conduct is that you had an open drink, not the real reason they decided to go after you.

Couldn’t that also go to a jury trial?

Yes, but the jury will be asked to decide the question of whether the accused had an open container, of which there will be little doubt.

A jury could decide that it's a case of selective malicious prosecution and acquit the accused despite believing them to have committed the crime, but that's uncommon and a much bigger reach than a jury weighing whether the accused was engaged in disorderly conduct because they're charged with disorderly conduct.

the brown paper bag is specifically due to the open container law.

if you are drinking from a bag, an officer must look into the bag to know you are drinking alcohol. looking into the bag requires probable cause and a 4th amendment protected search.

Yes and police always follow the law, are truthful about what caused them to have probable cause, don’t use it to harass minorities/poor.

And when people are arrested the underfunded overworked public defenders can do a great job defending the rights of the accused.

Go to a bar and try to get a beer to go.

Are you white?

No, neither I nor my friends are white :)

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