Kansas Supreme Court Hears Gay Teen Appeal
365Gay.com,
August 31, 2004
By 365Gay.com Newscenter Staff
Topeka, Kansas—The American Civil
Liberties Union today asked the Kansas Supreme Court to reduce the sentence of
a young man who is serving 16 years more in prison than he would if he were
heterosexual because of Kansas’s so-called “Romeo and Juliet” law. The
law makes sexual relations with a minor a lesser crime if both people are
teens, but only applies to opposite-sex relations.
“The Constitution guarantees that all citizens are
supposed to be treated equally, but Matthew Limon is set to be in prison until
he is 36 years old, while he would have been released before turning 20 if he
were heterosexual,” said Dick Kurtenbach, Executive Director of the ACLU of
Kansas and Western Missouri. “We’re not saying the state shouldn’t
punish those who break the law. We are only asking that the state do the right
thing and treat gay teenagers the same as it does straight teenagers.”
In February of 2000, Limon and another male teenager were
both students at the same residential school for developmentally disabled
youth in Miami County, Kansas. A week after Limon’s 18th birthday, he
performed consensual oral sex on the other teenager, who was nearly 15 years
old—three years, one month and a few days younger. Because Kansas’s
so-called “Romeo and Juliet” law gives much lighter sentences to
heterosexual teenagers who have sex with younger teens but specifically
excludes gay teenagers, Limon was sentenced to 17 years in prison. A
heterosexual teenager with the same record would serve no longer than 15
months for the same offense.
After the Kansas Court of Appeals upheld the conviction
in January, the Kansas Supreme Court agreed to hear the case. The ACLU had
taken Limon’s case back to the lower court after the U.S. Supreme Court
ordered the court to reconsider the matter in light of the Supreme Court’s
decision last summer in Lawrence v. Texas, which struck down all same-sex-only
sodomy laws.
“The excuses that Kansas is trying to use for
sentencing a gay teen to a prison term 13 times longer than a straight teen
would receive for the same offense have all been proven wrong by social
welfare and public health experts,” said James Esseks, Litigation Director
of the ACLU’s Lesbian and Gay Rights Project, who argued the appeal before
the Kansas Supreme Court this afternoon. “Equal protection for all citizens
means that a state has to justify treating one group of Americans so much more
harshly than it does others, and there is no justification here.”
In friend-of-the-court briefs filed earlier this month,
several social work and public health organizations took the state to task for
its attempts to justify the harsher sentences for gay teens. In one brief, the
National Association of Social Workers (NASW) and its Kansas chapter debunked
the state’s claims that the length of Limon’s sentence is justified
because young people who engage in same-sex intimacy are so impressionable
that they may be swayed into becoming gay. The NASW pointed to social science
evidence that same-sex attractions surface much earlier in life—well before
puberty—and that one gay sexual experience can’t make someone “turn”
gay.
In another brief, several public health groups, including
the American Public Health Association and its Kansas chapter, the American
Foundation for AIDS Research, and the National Minority AIDS Council, analyzed
the state’s claims that the “Romeo and Juliet” law will help prevent HIV
transmission, pointing out that the law ignores the realities of HIV
transmission among heterosexuals, particularly women. The public health groups
also pointed out that the risk of a male acquiring HIV through unprotected
oral sex with another male—precisely what Limon is being punished for—is
extremely low.
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