A guy in Fairfax County, Virginia was arrested for indecent exposure when neighbors saw him walking around the house without any clothes on. Story here. The Washington Post reports it this way:

The way Eric Williamson tells it, he might have been making coffee or flipping eggs or taking a picture down from the wall when a woman and her 7-year-old son walked by his Springfield house and saw him, through the window, naked.

He says he never saw them and never knew they'd seen him -- until the police showed up.

There are conflicting accounts of what happened Monday morning, but everyone agrees on this: The 29-year-old was naked and home alone, and he could face up to a year in jail.

"I looked straight at the cops and said, 'You're telling me that none of you guys have ever walked across your kitchen or run to the laundry room to get some pants?' " said Williamson, who was handcuffed and taken before a magistrate. "I was treated like an animal. If there was something offensive, would not a knock on the door and heads-up suffice?"

If you read the Onion (and if you don't, you should), this is old news. The satirical newspaper ran an article a few years ago about a guy who lounged around the house naked. Eventually, everything that you see in the Onion comes true, which is why the Onion is the best newspaper in America.

Assuming that this guy was just walking around the house naked and someone saw him through the window, is it legal to arrest him? In my opinion, no. American law is rife with protections arising from the home. The Fourth Amendment to the Constitution protects against unreasonable searches and seizures and makes specific reference to home searches without proper warrants. In 1994, the Supreme Court held in City of Ladue v. Gilleo, that the government cannot prohibit homeowners from posting political signs on their property. A man's home may not be his castle, but it's pretty damned close.

The one Supreme Court case that comes to mind, though, is Stanley v. Georgia, decided in 1969. This was a strange case. The Supreme Court has held the First Amendment does not protect obscene materials, defined as prurient works that lack any political, social or any other redeeming value. But ... under Stanley v. Georgia, you can have obscene materials in your house. What happened in this case was as strange as the Fairfax County case from a few weeks ago. The police came to Stanley's house because they were investigating his bookkeeping activities. They found some eight-millimeter film in his desk. So they watched the film in Stanley's house, using his projector and movie screen in an upstairs living room. Stanley was arrested because the films were pornographic.

Justice Thurgood Marshall, two years into his Supreme Court tenure after risking his life as a civil rights lawyer challenging government-sanctioned racial discrimination, wrote that "Th[e] right to receive information and ideas, regardless of their social worth ... is fundamental to our free society. Moreover, in the context of this case -- a prosecution for mere possession of printed or filmed matter in the privacy of a person's own home -- that right takes on an added dimension. For also fundamental is the right to be free, except in very limited circumstances, from unwanted governmental intrusions into one's privacy." The Court added:

These are the rights that [Stanley] is asserting in the case before us. He is asserting the right to read or observe what he pleases -- the right to satisfy his intellectual and emotional needs in the privacy of his own home. He is asserting the right to be free from state inquiry into the contents of his library. Georgia contends that appellant does not have these rights, that there are certain types of materials that the individual may not read or even possess. Georgia justifies this assertion by arguing that the films in the present case are obscene. But we think that mere categorization of these films as "obscene" is insufficient justification for such a drastic invasion of personal liberties guaranteed by the First and Fourteenth Amendments. Whatever may be the justifications for other statutes regulating obscenity, we do not think they reach into the privacy of one's own home. If the First Amendment means anything, it means that a State has no business telling a man, sitting alone in his own house, what books he may read or what films he may watch. Our whole constitutional heritage rebels at the thought of giving government the power to control men's minds.

This is nice language. You don't see court opinions like this these days. Mostly because the police don't raid your house and rummage through your things and watch movies in projectors in your living room. The Stanley case arose in the 1960's, before society became more enlightened about governmental misconduct. What makes the police think they can arrest a guy for standing around his house naked is beyond me. If you don't want to see a naked man, then look the other way.