12.38 am, Tuesday February 14 2012

Criminal charge for man naked inside home

14:30 AEDT Fri Dec 18 2009
By ninemsn staff and agencies
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Erick Williamson is appealing the verdict. (AAP)
Erick Williamson is appealing the verdict. (AAP)

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A US man has been charged with indecent exposure for being naked in his own home.

Erick Williamson, 29 was observed without clothes through a doorway and a window, by a seven-year-old boy and his mother who were walking by.

Williamson argued that it was his home, and therefore he could choose to go nude.

But a judge found against him, saying that he intended to make himself visible to passers-by.

The Virginia man said he will appeal the decision.

"I think that being tried and found guilty of something like this is outrageous," Williamson said after he was convicted and sentenced.

"I feel like I'm living in a fishbowl."

Williamson testified that he never intended to expose himself and was simply exercising "personal freedom" as he spent several hours naked in his Springfield home packing up belongings.

Police, prosecutors and two witnesses, though, said Williamson's actions were designed to draw attention to himself.

The first woman who passed by, school librarian Joyce Giuliani, said she heard some loud singing as she left her home and drove to work. As she drove by Williamson's home, she saw him naked, standing directly behind a large window.

A few hours later, Yvette Dean was walking her seven-year-old son to school along a trail that runs by Williamson's home.

She heard a loud rattle, looked to her left and saw Williamson standing naked, full frontal, in a side doorway.

"He gave me eye contact," Dean said.

As she turned the corner, she looked back at the home, in disbelief at what she had just seen.

Again, she saw Williamson, naked in the same window.

One of Williamson's housemates testified that Williamson had been nude well before dawn.

Timothy Baclit testified that he woke up around 5am to go to work and saw Williamson walking around "naked ... with a hard hat."

He said he warned Williamson that he would be visible to passers-by but that Williamson did not respond.

Williamson, 29, said the conversation with Baclit never occurred and that he never noticed that two women had seen him.

He said "it did not occur to me" that people outside the home might see him naked.

Regardless of whether he was seen, Williamson's conduct does not constitute indecent exposure, said his attorney, Dickson Young.

Under Virginia law, the charge requires "an obscene display or exposure" and must occur in "a public place or a place where others are present."

Young argued that neither prong had been met.

"Mere nudity is insufficient to declare conduct obscene," Young said, noting that none of the women testified that Williamson was aroused or that he made any sort of obscene gesture.

"Nudity in one's own home is not a crime."

 
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