SAN FRANCISCO -- It's a crime in California to urinate in a public place, a state appeals court ruled today. The case before the court came from Berkeley, where a police officer detained a man urinating in the parking lot of a closed restaurant one Sunday morning in January 2003. The officer searched David McDonald and found drugs. McDonald was charged with narcotics possession. But if he hadn't been committing a crime in the first place -- urinating in the open -- the search would have been illegal and the found drugs couldn't be used against him. To deal with...
