According to the most recent statistics from Pornhub—no, really—the average viewer in the United States spends 10 minutes and 37 seconds watching videos on the site per session. David J. Lomanto is clearly way, way above average, at least when it comes to his viewing habits. On April 22, 2014, the 53-year-old New Jersey man was arrested after police officers caught him using an unnamed fast food restaurant’s Wi-Fi connection to stream a lot of porn on his iPad.
By the time the cops arrived, Lomanto had been sitting in his car in the parking lot, watching adult content for more than three and a half hours. Yes, three and a half hours.
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The following April, Lomanto was indicted on charges of fourth-degree public communication of obscenity and obstructing a criminal investigation. A year later, he was convicted of those charges, and the judge added a disorderly conduct charge as well. He was sentenced to two one-year terms of probation and five days in jail, which he had already served. Lomanto attempted to appeal those convictions earlier this year, but on Tuesday, the New Jersey state appellate court denied that request.
That brings an official-official end to a case that started more than five years ago, on that April Tuesday when Lomanto parked his car, rolled his windows down and started streaming a ton of adult videos to his iPad. About half an hour into his weeknight binge, a woman parked next to him while her 12-year-old son went into the restaurant to grab dinner.
According to court documents, the unidentified mom looked at Lomanto’s iPad and noticed what he was watching. She said that she saw a “woman with blond hair” going down on a dude, and then the two of them had sex onscreen. She also saw a penis in the video. “The mother became ‘[m]ortified and shocked’ as they lived in a small town and she ‘[n]ever experienc[ed] anything like th[at] in [her] life,’” the documents state.
Later that evening, the woman told a friend what she’d witnessed, and that person ultimately called the cops. The police arrived at the parking lot more than two hours later, and Lomanto was still in his car, still streaming porn, and he still had his windows down. When an officer asked him for his identification, he refused, and he also initially refused to get out of his vehicle, which led to that obstruction charge.
A computer expert examined Lomanto’s iPad, and officers learned that he’d been “browsing one or more pornography websites” from 6:30 p.m. until 10 p.m. that night. (He was also juggling a number of Skype chats at the same time, under the username “hunkofburninglove”… seriously.)
NBC News reports that Lomanto’s attempt to appeal his conviction was based on what he believed to be an overly broad definition of the obscenity law, and he also tried to argue that watching porn in his own car “is protected under the U.S. Constitution.” The court disagreed, perhaps after failing to find the term “oral sex” anywhere in the 7,591 words that make up the original document and its 27 Amendments.
“Watching pornography in public serves no legitimate purpose,” the court wrote in its decision. Well, that’s not entirely true: Pornhub probably keeps track of that kind of thing, too.
