Blue heronn puts on show at lakeke / B5

Big Brother is always sticking his big nose where it doesn’t belong, and now an Ohio appeals court says he has leeway to snoop in that most sacred of personal spaces.

Nope, not the bedroom, or the bathroom.

The garage.

I shudder to think.

My home is my castle. And because my castle doesn’t have a finished basement, the garage is this king’s best shot at peace when he needs time away from the queen, prince, princess and royal beagle.

In an egregious act of tyranny, the court has stripped the poor old king of that expectation of privacy.

I might not have much in common with Anthony J. Duvernay, a Lima man now serving 18 years in a state prison for drug-related convictions, but we apparently do share the belief that our

garages are nobody’s business but our own.

In 2015, investigators with the Lima/Allen County Interdiction Task Force installed a video camera on a utility pole and used it to watch his home.

Duvernay was convicted but argued on appeal that the pole camera violated his Fourth Amendment and state-constitutional protections against unreasonable searches and seizures by the government. He said the camera gave investigators a look into his attached garage, which he said violated his privacy.

A lower state court disagreed, and now Ohio’s 3rd District Court of Appeals has done the same.

The court concurred with prior case law that a person’s reasonable expectation of privacy extends to the “curtilage” of the home, defined as the area that harbors “intimate activity associated with the sanctity of a man’s home and the privacies of life.”

Where do you drink beer after mowing the lawn?

Where do you grill when it rains?

Where do you hide until storms of marital discontent blow over, or until the royal

beagle has been walked by another member of the royal family?

The garage, that’s where. It’s the adult version of a fort built out of sheets.

But the court reiterated what we already knew. You can’t expect privacy in a space that is open to public view.

“Indeed, Duvernay’s neighbors ‘would have a direct view into the garage if the garage door was opened and would actually probably be able to see better into the garage’ than the view that the pole camera was able to capture,” the court wrote, partly quoting the testimony of task-force member Jesse Harrod.

It is here that I would make my legal stand, because I can say with some confidence that my neighbors know better than to look directly into my garage. Looking into my garage is akin to looking at the sun. It can be done, but not without some retinal scarring.

Garages are for cars, you say? Not at my house, where the automobiles have been exiled to the driveway.

The central feature of my garage is my 30-yearold canoe, dry-docked on sawhorses for the past two years because of a hole in the fiberglass that I never get around to patching.

The canoe gave the royal family a license to sprawl. These days, the garage space has been gobbled up by two speakers that my father built in the 1960s that might or might not work; three skateboards, one of them mine; a partially deconstructed set of the yard game ladderball; a wheelbarrow loaded with camping gear; and a sizable arsenal of Nerf weaponry. I’ve actually stepped on a rake and whacked my forehead with the handle, just like they do in Looney Tunes.

At Duvernay’s trial, Harrod described the suspect’s garage similarly.

“Really the only thing you could see in the garage was, well it looked like a cluttered mess with random boxes stacked up and maybe some shelving,” Harrod testified. “But you couldn’t really see much beyond that.”

Objection, your honor! Inflammatory!

Quoting another bit of case law, the appeals court stated that “Fourth Amendment protection of the home has never been extended to require law-enforcement officers to shield their eyes when passing by a home on public thoroughfares.”

That might not be required, but when my garage door is up, averting the eyes is not a bad idea.