Jail Cell Not A Public Place (Maybe)

The Third District Court of Appeal decided Taylor in the defendant's favor today, at least on the indecent exposure ground. The question in the case was whether a county jail inmate who exposes himself while in a jail cell does so in a "public place" and therefore commits indecent exposure. Here's my original post on the case, and here is the court's opinion.

Note that the opinion doesn't acknowledge that this happened in a jail cell. What we do know, however, is that courts should apply the definition of "public place" that appears in the jury instruction (Instruction 11.9, defining a "public place" as one that was "intended or designed to be frequented or resorted to by the public"). While we originally argued that it was a matter of common sense that the jury instruction definition was binding, in the future defendants can cite Taylor for that proposition.

It remains to be seen how the court will interpret the phrase "the public." I argued at oral argument in Taylor that "the public" means "people as a whole" (as defined by Merriam-Webster's, for instance) and therefore would not encompass a jail cell even though individual members of the public, such as jail guards, may go there. The court didn't need to reach that question in this case, since it apparently found that there was an insufficient evidentiary record under any interpretation of "the public."