A central Pennsylvania man was so annoyed with what he regarded as light pollution from his next-door neighbor’s house that he decided to fully illuminate his displeasure.
So, Joseph McConnell got eight construction-grade floodlights – the kind you see at highway work sites – aimed them at his neighbor’s home and turned them on.
As a police officer who answered the resulting complaint described it, those floodlights caused McConnell’s entire Manheim Township neighborhood to be “lit up like Wrigley Field,” the stadium where the Chicago Cubs play.
McConnell didn’t get the satisfaction he as hoping for. Instead, he ended up with a disorderly conduct conviction and a $200 fine levied by a Lancaster County judge.
A state Superior Court panel just hit the off switch on his appeal of that conviction.
According to the state court’s opinion by Senior Judge James Gardner Colins, McConnell’s light battle occurred on the night of May 31, 2019.
At least seven neighbors, including the intended target, called the police, who said they spoke with McConnell for about 45 minutes before he agreed to turn off the lights. A district judge convicted McConnell of the disorderly conduct charge and fined him $25. McConnell appealed to the county court, which upheld the conviction and upped the fine to $200.
During the county court trial, McConnell’s next-door neighbor said the beams of the flood lights “penetrated every window on the backside of our house.” He said McConnell agreed to extinguish the flood lights only after he doused his own back yard motion detector-triggered security light.
Another neighbor testified the flood lights lit up at least nine houses. Township police Lieutenant Charles Melhorn, who used the Wrigley Field analogy, also described the scene as “just a sea of light.” Neighbors 100 yards away were complaining, the officer said. He said McConnell refused to turn off the lights even after being told he could be cited.
McConnell testified that he got the flood lights after township officials told him they couldn’t do anything about the neighbor’s lights that were annoying him.
McConnell “stated that he ‘put up the lights to make a statement’and he thought that if he was cited and fined for his conduct, he would later be able to go in front of a judge to explain why he did what he did and the judge would also be able to address (the neighbor’s) lighting at the same hearing,” Colins wrote.
On appeal to the state court, McConnell claimed the evidence didn’t support his disorderly conduct conviction. He insisted “his light display had a legitimate purpose because his actions were a protest against Manheim Township’s lack of light regulation that he felt had adversely affected his quality of life.” Colins noted.
Colins instead backed the county judge’s finding that McConnell had “created a hazardous or physically offensive condition by an act which served no legitimate purpose.”
McConnell’s light show was a “direct assault on the physical senses of members of the public,” Colins concluded. “By his own words, then, (McConnell) admitted that he specifically intended to create a public disturbance that would lead to him being cited for an offense so that he could have his proverbial day in court.”
The citation didn’t breach McConnell’s free speech rights, either, the state judge found.
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‘Lit up like Wrigley Field:’ Man who aimed 8 flood lights at neighbor’s home can’t beat conviction, $200 fine - PennLive
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