Man Imprisoned For Epic Poop, Graphic Court Ruling Is A Surreal Must-Read

A court has upheld a conviction against a man whose epic poop crossed the line into vandalism, and you have got to read the bizarre ruling in this case.

The story is simple. Basically, 50-year-old Ronald Strong spent a week in jail for leaving the bathroom of a federal courthouse covered in his poop. The unfortunate soul who discovered the scene said that 75% of the floor was “covered in feces” and that more was “smeared more than two feet up on the walls.”

Additionally, Strong’s feces was on paper towel and toilet dispensers, on the toilet paper itself, and on part of the toilet seat and beside the bowl.

Strong said that he didn’t mean to leave such a mess, and blamed his heart medication for causing him to poop his pants. He went into the bathroom to clean up the mess, but apparently made a worse one in the process.

The story isn’t nearly as entertaining as the ruling itself, though. Strong seemed to struggle to try and describe how difficult it was to clean up his mess.

“I don’t know if you’ve ever had an incident in the kitchen where you have something spill or something, you’re grabbing everything and anything trying to mop up milk or — I don’t know if you’ve ever spilled spaghetti sauce and there’s meat, you’re trying to get it up as quick as you can. And that’s – basically it was just like this frenetic pace, but it was repulsive, I mean, the smell was — and I was embarrassed, I mean, here I had used the bathroom in my pants, a 50-year-old man and I was in a federal courthouse. It was very, very embarrassing.”

Strong tried to defend his actions by saying that there were no signs in the courthouse prohibiting damage to government property. He also said that he didn’t mean to cause the mess. The court rejected his defense.

“The relevant question is not whether he purposefully defecated his pants, but whether he willfully spread his feces all over the bathroom resulting in a nuisance, hazard, and damage,” read the majority opinion.

One of the judges did side with Strong, however, noting that the cleaning lady’s description of the mess yielded poor context (he was particularly hung up on her use of the word “smears”) and might have been exaggerated.

The judge wrote that the cleaning lady’s described “smears” were “not necessarily like finger smears but just chunks—chunks and smears, pretty much, kind of like chunky peanut butter.”

The judge cited this as proper evidence to conclude: “No rational factfinder could infer willfulness from the consistency of feces.”

What do you think? Was Ronald Strong’s epic poop an epic accident, or is he really just a stinky vandal?

[Image: Shutterstock]