John Swift lay sleeping in his bed Saturday night of Welcome Weekend while his roommate Drew Thomas tried to keep students away from their house.

In fear of being suspected of partying, Thomas and his friends attempted to keep mass crowds walking down M.A.C. Avenue away from their lawn.

Swift, a communication senior, woke to find the East Lansing police waiting on his porch with a $250 noise-violation citation in hand. The ticket reported that there were eight people on the lawn and others were leaving noisily.

"John wasn't even outside," said Thomas, a history junior. "There was about six of us out on the front lawn - not partying. We were telling people to keep moving.

"We knew the previous night a bunch of people got tickets, and we didn't want to get one. There were thousands of people out walking around, drinking, looking for parties."

Feeling wrongly accused, Thomas contacted the Lansing branch of Michigan's American Civil Liberties Union, who then represented Swift in the case.

A formal hearing was held on Oct. 28 at 54-B District Court and the case was dismissed. No reason was given as to why the case was dropped.

Henry Silverman, president of Lansing's ACLU and history professor, said he expected the case to be dismissed.

"It's clearly students that the law is engineered against," Silverman said. "I don't mind punishing students when they've broken a law. But an overly broad law is going to end up being an unjust law."

But East Lansing police Capt. Juli Liebler said the citations issued by police are justified as they respond to legitimate neighborhood complaints.

"You can't have noise emitting from your property whatsoever," Liebler said.

She added that a large number of students usually fight the citations they receive.

"But they're not usually dismissed; maybe pled down to a lesser charge," she said.