Last week a three-judge panel of the Kansas Court of Appeals upheld a 17-year jail sentence given to an 18-year-old guy who gave a blowjob to a 14-year-old guy. (Here are the majority, concurring and dissenting opinions.) This was his third “offense.” Seventeen years in jail for a gay blowjob! If one of them had been female, the sentence would have been, at most, 15 months.
I blogged about this in June. The Kansas Court of Appeals had previously ruled the same way; the Kansas Supreme Court had declined to review the case and it went up to the U.S. Supreme Court. Two days after Lawrence, the Supreme Court vacated the judgment:
The U.S. Supreme Court was basically telegraphing to the Kansas Appeals Court that the original Kansas decision was unconstitutional. “The court’s directive… that the Kansas courts reconsider the Limon case with Lawrence v. Texas in mind was tantamount to an instruction to set aside the prison term imposed on Mr. Limon,” the New York Times said in June. But apparently the justices should have been more explicit, because the judges of the Kansas Appeals Court (two of them, anyway) chose to ignore this directive. I don’t see why the justices didn’t just reverse the ruling instead of sending it back to Kansas for reconsideration. Judge Green is correct that Limon v. Kansas involved a minor and the Equal Protection Clause, while the Lawrence decision involved adults and was based on the Due Process Clause. (Justice O’Connor’s concurrence was based the Equal Protection Clause.) But this still stinks. I hope this case goes back to the U.S. Supreme Court and the justices reverse.
So, yeah. Homosexual sex in Kansas with someone who’s 14 or 15 can get you 17 years in jail. That’s right. If a high school senior and a high school freshman in Kansas have gay sex, the senior can go to prison for SEVENTEEN YEARS.
Sure, let’s send him to prison. No chance for gay sex there.
This is outrageous.
It has been happening for decades. Notmally it doesn’t reach that high a court. First case I read of involved a minor of 17 and an adult of 18.
Twenty-five years in jail for the latter.
Huh!
I thought the “age of consent” was 16, regardless of what type of sex it was.
Thanks for writing about this. Do you think that with kids reaching puberty at 10-11 and having hormones raging through their bodies by the time that they’re 12 that maybe it’s time to rethink our views on things like the age of consent?
Maybe, Scott. Although I think the idea of an age of consent is based on society’s idea of how old a person is before he or she has good enough judgment to decide to have sex.
Jimmy — age of consent varies by state, and sometimes differs with sexual orientation. Ageofconsent.com has charts by state — although they are woefully out of date, given that same-sex adult sodomy is now legal.
Just goes to show that the US is still in the Dark Ages. Your Supreme Court is OK (most of the time) but the President et al. and some of your states are shockingly antiquated. People in the rest of the world laugh at you.
It is terrifying to contemplate that someone ends up in jail for 17 years, let alone a 17/18 year old boy. who will try for the rest of his life to tell himself “I lost half of my life because of prejudices in the legislature and the courts of my home state”. Someone should help the poor boy to seek refugee in a European country. We cry for him.