Desert justice

From the Press-Enterprise:
"A Corona woman accused of exposing herself to a 14-year-old boy will not be tried for indecent exposure because the law against such behavior applies only to men, a visiting judge in Riverside County has ruled. " The specific statue punishes any person who "exposes his person." The District Attorney's office later realized that the penal code specifies that masculine pronouns apply to the feminine and neuter as well, and plans to appeal the ruling on these grounds. At trial, their strategy was to argue that the judge's interpretation of the statute was unconstitutional. While that might be used to invalidate a statute (for example, in the 1970s when the New Jersey Supreme Court held that the common law crime of being a common scold was not enforcable because of its gender specitivity), but it seems hard to believe that this argument could justify widening its criminal application. Full story