A Youngwood man will serve a short probation term after he was charged with desecration of the U.S. flag.
Matthew J. Utzman, 21, appeared in court Tuesday to answer charges associated with an incident Sept. 2 in which police said he took a small flag from a veterans monument in Youngwood, broke it in two and threw the pieces on the porch of a nearby home.
Police charged Utzman with a misdemeanor offense of desecration of a flag as well as summary offenses of criminal mischief and scattering rubbish.
“It used to be way more common but you don’t see it any more in view of the changes we now see in respect to people’s rights to protest,” said Utzman’s lawyer, Richard Galloway.
Utzman can enroll in the Accelerated Rehabilitative Disposition Program for first-time nonviolent offenders and was sentenced by Westmoreland County Common Pleas Court Judge Tim Krieger to serve three months on probation. Utzman did not admit guilt to the charges and can have his record expunged after he completes probation.
The judge ordered Utzman, whom Galloway said suffers from mental health issues, to pay $15 to the borough as restitution for the 8-inch flag.
According to court records, state police charged Utzman after a witness reported the incident. Police originally charged him with a felony count of institutional vandalism but replaced it with the lesser misdemeanor charge of flag desecration.
Mary Catherine Roper, deputy legal director with the American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania, said the flag desecration charge was not improper. The charge, which dates back to 1972, specifically precludes prosecutions in cases where a U.S. flag is used as part of political protests or for free speech purposes.
The charge can be applied in cases where the mutilation of a flag is not part of a free-speech effort but solely as a means to damage property.
“That statute explicitly exempts actions taken for political purposes. We don’t really know how often it is prosecuted but we hear about it every couple of years,” Roper said.
The ACLU intervened in a 2014 case in Blair County against a man who was charged with desecration of the flag while protesting the proposed Keystone Pipeline route through the Wounded Knee battleground site in South Dakota. In that case, Joshuaa Brubaker was accused of flying a U.S. flag on his porch upside down as a show of distress and spray-painting it with the letters AIM to signify American Indian Movement.
A Blair County judge dismissed the criminal case. In 2016, Brubaker filed a civil-rights lawsuit against the township where the incident occurred, claiming the charges violated his free-speech rights. The township settled with him for $55,000.
The U.S. Supreme Court has struck down laws that prevent the burning or desecration of the flag, saying those statutes violated the Constitution’s First Amendment free speech rights.
The Pennsylvania law is not one that will survive a challenge, Roper said.
“There is no reason to challenge it because it is already protected by the First Amendment,” she said.
