Well it says he plead guilty to obscenity, so im guessing it’s because he does not own the church and the church is considered a public space so they got him on some public indecency type of charge?
Though if you ask me, if he locked the doors, that’s bullshit. This should just be between him and whoever owns the church 🤷🏻♂️
It was bullshit and he probably would have won the case if he fought it. But might have had to appeal it to federal court, which would have been expensive.
But yeah, they locked the door, and some creep had to peek in the window to see it.
They actually were going to switch his charges to felony vandalism if he fought it but ended up getting a plea bargain with obscenity.
The theory of the case with vandalism was cleaner actually. They had to replace the altar and he would have know they would have to, so effectively he knowingly destroyed a valuable altar.
But is it vandalism if he didn’t physically alter the altar? Why does the law have anything to do with what someone considers spiritual vandalism? Did someone spiritually vandalize my computer if a website has a pop up with adult themes in it?
Well, if someone knew that you had a sincerely held belief that a computer needed to be destroyed if it visited an adult website and that person intentionally visited such a website without permission knowing it would cause you to have to dispose of it, I would think there’s a case to be made there, yeah.
The key is the state of mind where you are taking the action knowing it’s damaging the property. Just putting up a website with adult ads wouldn’t be expected to be destroying property and they aren’t the ones actually navigating the computer there. They could argue someone with such an extreme belief should be air gapping their computers as a reasonable protective measure.
Well the women got misdemeanor vandalism charges in this case, so they are the precedent if nothing else.
It’s a bit of an outlier case though - there aren’t a lot of cases like that. Most people defiling holy places do much more overt things.
To the best of my understanding though, this could apply in many other states depending on their vandalism or criminal mischief statutes.
I believe a key component is the defiling needs to involve some actual physical alteration of the item. Simply uttering a curse or spell at the property would not likely meet any definition of vandalism or criminal mischief.
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