Disorderly Conduct ?

I don't know? Personally I think what he did is just stupid.
Disorderly conduct? Maybe? The op did imply that he "splashed" the coins and they were spilt all over. Plus he probably created quite a scene in the office.
I would have thrown him out of my store! Remember, the person taking the payment most likely had no control over his "dispute"
IMO he sounds like an arse!

I suspect the disorderly conduct charge came not from the act of paying the bill with pennies, but rather his actions and conduct while paying the bill. It sounds like he was creating a disturbance in the clinic.

Most of the rest of the world has set limits to what the legal tender of certain denominations of coins is; such laws are in place specifically to prevent nitwittery like this. Here in Australia, if you try to pay a bill - even a tax bill to the government - in a huge pile of low-denomination coins, the person at the counter has the right to tell you to go away and bring back some sensible money (but whether they know they have this right or not is another story). Our smallest denomination, the 5 cent coin, is only legal tender for amounts up to $5.

In America, however, the law is very generally worded:


So it appears that any quantity of coin is allowable for paying any debt. "Paying with pennies" is legal. And I agree, it was probably the complainant's attitude and additional actions, rather than merely the act of paying with pennies, that got him in trouble with the law.

As already well noted it was not the coins but what he did with them. People having to stop what they are doing to try and find a bunch of any coins purposely dumped like that is no fun for the employees.
And too imagine if one of those was a 1914D Lincoln Cent.

When I was 16 I paid a $5 parking ticket with pennies. No problem except the lady knew my mother and when mom heard about I was scolded a little.

Kind of like this guy who tried to pay his property tax here last year in Canada with over 200,000 pennies in a kid's swimming pool.

http://www.torontosun.com/news/cana...4723656.html

See, I've never like this sort of stuff regardless of whether it's legal or not. Mostly because it's never done because someone just has "too many pennies" or whatever quasi-legitimate reason gets bandied about but rather because someone has some fashion of grudge against whoever is about to get a ton of pennies dumped on them.

Now, if this ever happened to me, I'd probably be a crank right back and make him count every single penny to "prove" that he's paying me truthfully.

"no no no. I do believe there's 5,000 dollars in pennies there sir but, you must understand, I need to be SURE that there is and, no, you can't leave while I have my slowest person here count them all. Also, they tend to lose count after 50 and can't write so...you may be here for a while."

Isn't it unsanitary to scatter nasty pennies wherever they were? And the labour to pick up these pennies and count them......this poor man should've seen it coming.