A Maryland man has been sentenced to one year in jail and fined $5,000 for throwing two large parties in violation of the state’s ban on gatherings of more than 10 people. The man, Shawn Marshall Myers, 42, was convicted on Friday of two counts of failure to comply with an emergency order, the Charles County State’s Attorney’s Office said in a statement. Judge W. Louis Hennessy of Charles County District Court, who heard the case without a jury, sentenced Mr. Myers to the maximum penalty on one of the counts. He will be on unsupervised probation for three years after his release, prosecutors said. Larry Hogan declared a state of emergency and put in place wide-ranging social distancing guidelines to mitigate the spread of the coronavirus.

Source: New York Times September 28, 2020 22:49 UTC