The line moves antagonizingly slowly as the minutes remaining on your lunch break whittle away. You sigh again when you remind yourself how much quicker you would be able to take customer deposits than the incompetent tellers. Suddenly there’s a commotion near the entrance – armed men have come rushing in and your eyes flit from the guns in their hands to their faces. Rather, where their faces should be. You ask yourself –
Is Batman breaking the law by wearing a mask?
In all of Texas’s Supreme Court history only one or two cases about wearing masks have made it before the SCOTX Justices.
The most relevant one was a case called Garcia v. State. Raoul Garcia was arrested in 1969 under a statute making the wearing of a mask illegal under certain circumstances.1 The law was applied against a gentleman for wearing makeup in public. The court ultimately found Garcia not guilty, reasoning that dressing up like a woman was not the same as obscuring one’s face.
In any case, the law is no longer on the books, so even if Batman were to apply Chanel lipstick beneath the cowl he would not be found guilty of a crime for wearing a mask in Texas.
Stay tuned for Part 2 as I dig deeper into the potential crimes of the Batman.
Endnotes
1 Source link.
