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 Myers to the maximum penalty on one of the counts. He will be on unsupervised probation for three years after his release, prosecutors said.

The trial and sentencing came six months after Governor Larry Hogan declared a state of emergency and put in place wide-ranging social distancing guidelines to mitigate the spread of the coronavirus.

The State’s Attorney’s Office said that a few others in Charles County had been charged with violating the governor’s order, but that Myers’s case was the first to have gone to trial.

Myers has already filed an appeal, prosecutors said. His lawyer, Hammad S. Matin, did not immediately respond Monday afternoon to emails or calls seeking comment.

Myers was arrested in late March, after the police responded to reports of two large parties five days apart at Myers’s home in Hughesville, a town of about 2,000 people in Southern Maryland.

The first time, on March 22, Myers had around 50 people in his home, prosecutors said. They said he was “argumentative” with police officers, but eventually agreed to disband the gathering.

On March 27, the police were called back to Myers’s house, where more than 50 people had gathered.

“Officers told Myers to disband the party, but again he was argumentative, claiming he and his guests had the right to congregate,” the statement said.

New York Times News Service