Time doesn’t come cheap on Times Square

But when Matthew Jones of Brooklyn lingered on the corner of 42nd Street and Seventh Avenue in the early morning of June 12, 2004, gabbing with friends as other pedestrians tried to get by, something unusual happened: He was arrested for it.

A police officer said Jones was impeding other pedestrians and charged him with disorderly conduct.

Jones is not taking the charges lying down (so to speak). After trying twice to get the charges dismissed, he has taken his case to the state’s highest court, the Court of Appeals, which heard arguments here on Wednesday.

In the prosecution’s view, it appears, the innocent do not dawdle.

According to the original complaint against Jones, the officer “observed defendant along with a number of other individuals standing around” on a public sidewalk in June 2004. Jones was “not moving, and that as a result of defendants’ behaviour, numerous pedestrians in the area had to walk around defendants.” Jones refused to move when asked, said the officer, Momen Attia, and then tried to run away. When Officer Attia tried to handcuff him, he “flailed his arms”, earning a second charge for resisting arrest.

After spending the night in jail, Jones contested the main charge and asked that it be dismissed. When the judge demurred, he pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor violation the next day and received no further sentence. But he soon filed an appeal, arguing that there had been no basis for the arrest in the first place.

Nancy E Little, Jones’s lawyer, said that neither the police nor the prosecutors claimed that he was doing anything other than standing on the sidewalk with friend— ¿ an activity, she said, that is not entirely without precedent in Manhattan. “You need something more,” she said, citing past Court of Appeals decisions. “You need to be being verbally abusive, or really blocking lots of people, or lying down on the sidewalk.”

The complaint, she added, did not allege that any other pedestrians had been seriously inconvenienced or that Jones had shouted at or shoved anyone or even that the alleged obstruction was more than temporary. Prosecutors did not say how big Jones’s group of friends was, or how many people were forced to walk around them.

Paula-Rose Stark, a Manhattan assistant district attorney, argued that the facts in the complaint were sufficient for the charge of disorderly conduct. Jones’s reckless intent, Stark said, was evident from the fact that his behavior was noticeable in the first place “amid the inevitable hustle and bustle of Times Square, the construction, the vehicular traffic.”