The Other Matthew
Matthew Limon, a mentally limited teen, was put away
for 17 years under Kansas’s harsh sodomy laws. If the Supreme Court hears
his case, it could blow the lid off archaic sex laws across the land.
Boston
Phoenix, February 20-27, 2003
By Michael Bronski
THE UNITED States Supreme Court
will revisit the question of whether sodomy laws should remain legal this term
when it takes up the case of Lawrence and Garner v. Texas. That case (see
“Public Safety,” News and Features, December 13, 2002) involves the arrest
of two men who were engaged in private, consensual sex when police, called to
their house by a nosy neighbor who wanted to see the men arrested for having
sex, filed a false report of a break-in. When considering sodomy laws, it
doesn’t get any neater than that: police bursting into the bedroom of two
men engaged in consensual sex. (Of course, the facts in 1986’s Bowers v.
Hardwick, in which the Supreme Court affirmed the legality of sodomy laws,
were very similar.)
But another sodomy case that’s been appealed to the
court, which the court has yet to say it will hear, raises more complicated
questions about sodomy. If the Supreme Court were to hear it and rule against
the law in question, it would deal a decisive blow against archaic sex laws in
this country.
That case, Matthew R. Limon v. the State of Kansas,
involves sex between teenagers, one of whom is mentally retarded. In February
2000, Matthew Limon, who was then 18, was sentenced to 17 years and two months
in prison for performing oral sex on a 14-year-old male. Limon suffers from a
mild form of mental retardation; his diagnosis places his mental capacity
between “borderline intellectual functioning” and “mild mental
retardation.” The sexual encounter took place at the Lakemary Center in
Paola, Kansas, which is a residential school for developmentally delayed
children and where Limon had been living since July 1999. Sometime in mid
February, a few weeks after his 18th birthday, Limon engaged in oral sex with
another male student — named in the court papers only as M.A.R. — who was
a few weeks short of his 15th birthday (their ages, as will become clear, are
significant in the case). M.A.R. initially consented to the sex, but then
changed his mind. When he told Limon to stop, Limon did so immediately.
Although it remains unclear how the police became involved in the case —
presumably someone from the Lakemary Center called them in — both Limon and
M.A.R. stated that the sex was consensual. But that didn’t stop the Kansas
state court from locking Limon away for a huge chunk of his life.
So how does a consensual blowjob between males — the
older of whom has the mental functioning of someone much younger — end with
a conviction under one of the harshest state sodomy laws still on the books
and a jail sentence of nearly two decades? And how were the courts able to
hand down such a draconian sentence, given that Kansas has a “Romeo and
Juliet law,” which is designed to decriminalize sexual activity between
young people? Passed in 1998, that law covers young people under the age of 19
who engage in consensual sexual activity with teens between 14 and 16 years
old. Recognizing that there may be developmental differences in the teen
years, the law also stipulates that the ages of the sexual partners be less
than four years apart. While the law does not legalize this sexual behavior,
it greatly reduces the penalties involved in punishing it. When the
interaction between Limon and M.A.R. took place, Limon was three years, one
month, and a few days older than M.A.R.
Well, unfortunately for Limon, Kansas’s Romeo and
Juliet law is meant to be taken literally. It applies only to Romeos and
Juliets, not to Romeos and Mercutios. It was explicitly written to exclude
application in cases involving same-sex activity. So Limon was tried as an
adult under the state’s harsh sodomy law. Specifically, he was charged with
engaging in criminal sodomy with a minor. The Kansas sodomy law was written in
1855 (when Kansas was still a territory), but was revised in 1983 to exclude
heterosexual activity.
Limon’s court-appointed lawyer, David Estes, first
argued that the Kansas law is patently unfair given that such radically
different standards are applied to heterosexuals and homosexuals. Estes’s
motion was denied, and a district court eventually found Limon guilty because
he admitted to the sexual activity. And since he had previously been found
guilty of a sodomy charge (once again, a consensual encounter with someone his
own age) when he was 15, the judge sentenced him to 17 years in jail. He was
also required to undergo five years of court supervision after his release and
to be classified as a “sexual offender,” a categorization that will stay
with him the rest of his life and, depending upon changes in Kansas law, could
mean that his name and address would be publicly available — kept on file at
police departments or even listed on Web sites.
If he or M.A.R. had been female, Limon would have been
charged under the Romeo and Juliet law and received, at most, a sentence of 15
months. It’s also entirely possible that if this had been a heterosexual
liaison instead of a homosexual one, the incident would never have been
brought to the attention of the police and simply dealt with as an internal
management problem at the Lakemary Center. As it stands now, Limon will not
get out of prison until he is in his mid 30s. And let’s face it, his limited
mental capacity, his sentence for a crime of homosexual sodomy, and his
sex-with-a-minor charge are going to make prison a living hell for the young
man: Limon will be a prime target for prison assault, rape, and general
persecution.
WHILE THE American court system commits horrendous
miscarriages of justice on a daily basis, surely the obvious inequality of
Matthew Limon’s case should make it ripe for reversal on appeal. Well, not
in Kansas. On November 15, 2001, the appeal, brought by Estes and the American
Civil Liberties Union, was heard by a three-member panel of the Kansas Court
of Appeals. Estes and the ACLU’s argument was simple: having two standards
of justice, one for queers and one for heterosexuals, was an obvious violation
of the 14th Amendment, which guarantees equal protection under the law.
Limon’s lawyers argued that Kansas’s Romeo and Juliet law, as it was
written, was unconstitutional and should be struck down, and that Matthew
Limon’s 17-year sentence was a product of discrimination based on sexual
orientation.
On February 20, 2002, the appeals court shocked
gay-rights and civil-liberties groups by upholding Limon’s conviction and
declaring that the state of Kansas has the right to make — and enforce — a
law that holds homosexuals and heterosexuals to different standards. Their
Catch-22ish reasoning was based on the fact that the Kansas sodomy statute —
under which Limon was convicted — applied only to same-sex activity, so
there was a legal precedent for treating homosexuals differently. But more
important, they argued, the Kansas sodomy law was constitutional because the
US Supreme Court had ruled in the infamous Bowers v. Hardwick that the
Constitution “does not confer a fundamental right upon homosexuals to engage
in sodomy.” Simply put, the idea that homosexuals and heterosexuals should
be treated equally before the law was nonsense. By this time, Limon had
already spent nearly two years in the Ellsworth Correctional Facility.
But observers shouldn’t have been so surprised. Given
Kansas’s cultural climate, the ruling was predictable. Shortly after the
Limon case first surfaced in the media, Kansas state representative Mike
O’Neal, chair of the Kansas House Judiciary Committee, happily admitted in
interviews that legislators, in refusing to amend the state’s sodomy statute
or the Romeo and Juliet law, were upholding the state’s long-standing
refusal to confer approval on same-sex relationships. This commitment,
O’Neal told the Associated Press, was based on a very specific tradition:
“The history is really biblically based. Kansas has kind of consistently
gone back on that biblical reference.” (This is no doubt the same thinking
that led the state’s Board of Education, in August 1999, to mandate that
creationism be taught in its public schools.)
Limon’s lawyers and the ACLU then appealed his case to
the Kansas Supreme Court. On June 13, 2002, the Court denied the appeal. The
denial was expected — in 1995, the court had refused to hear the appeal of
Max Movsovitz, who was convicted under the sodomy law (and Topeka’s
solicitation law) for simply replying, “Yeah” when a plainclothes cop
asked him if he wanted a blowjob. Still, it merely reinforced the sense that
arguments of equal protection for homosexuals have no legal merit under Kansas
state law.
Now the immediate question is whether the US Supreme
Court will elect to hear Matthew R. Limon v. Kansas. As with Garner and
Lawrence v. Texas, which involves a sodomy statute that applies only to
homosexual activity, the case is being argued on equal-protection grounds.
There is no doubt that both of these cases bring into focus the immediate need
for the Supreme Court to reverse its 1986 Bowers v. Hardwick decision — a
decision that has provided the secure constitutional foundation for
maintaining a national policy that treats heterosexuals with more dignity and
legal protection than that afforded homosexuals.
But Limon v. Kansas is important for many more reasons
than these. Although it embodies one of the most important issues in the
contemporary fight for gay rights — simple equality under the law — it
touches on a host of other, more moral issues as well: the right of gay youth
to have consensual sexual relationships, the right of the mentally challenged
to be treated with respect to their capabilities, and the rights of gay people
to be understood and accepted as sexual beings.
In this, it’s important to note that the case of
Matthew Limon stands in confusing juxtaposition with the case of that other
noted Matthew: Matthew Shepard. In 1998, Matthew Shepard became a worldwide
symbol of the horror of anti-gay violence. Unlike Matthew Limon, whose picture
is almost never printed with news reports of his plight, Shepard —
middle-class, college-educated, highly intelligent, and creative — was a
perfect poster child for the cause publicized by his terrible death. Shepard
was presented to the American public as an unadulterated victim. At the time
of his death and even during the trial of his murderers, it was seen as
inappropriate for the media to discuss his HIV status, his possible sexual
intentions in chatting up his eventual killers in the bar that night, or even
his probably run-of-the-mill sexual history. Of course, there was good reason
for this: to avoid playing into the basest homophobic (and sexist) stereotype
that he “was asking for it.” But the reality was that the image of Shepard
as “innocent victim” presented the public with a less-than-full portrait
of his unique, complex life as a young gay man.
However Matthew Shepard was perceived, there’s no
getting around the fact that Matthew Limon makes people much more
uncomfortable. Think about it: Limon was an 18-year-old having sex with a
14-year-old. Even under Kansas’s Romeo and Juliet law, that is illegal. Many
Americans have problems with queers who are “consenting adults,” never
mind “consenting teens.” If this weren’t enough, there is Matthew
Limon’s mental functioning to consider. For many, the idea of the mentally
retarded having sex, or even having the capacity to make sexual decisions, is
upsetting. (In this regard, Limon is lucky that he was prosecuted in 2001 and
not 1964. Under auspices of a 1913 law that wasn’t repealed until 1965,
officials of the state of the Kansas sterilized over 3000 women and men who
had been classified as “insane” or “retarded.” At least 25 percent of
them, presumably all men, had been sterilized through castration.)
Fundamentally, the Limon case is about the right to have
sex. Historically, the American legal system has been able to address issues
of sexual freedom by ruling on subjects that are intimately connected to sex.
The breakthrough decision about birth control was Griswold v. Connecticut,
which gave married couples the right to purchase contraceptives (that they
would use while having sex). The breakthrough decision on interracial
marriages was the appropriately named Loving v. Virginia, which gave
interracial couples the right to marry (and then have sex). The breakthrough
decision on abortion was Roe v. Wade, which gave women the right to choose
whether or not to carry an unexpected pregnancy to term (after having had
sex). The issue in Limon is: should gay teens — as young as 14 — be able
to have sex under the same legal conditions as heterosexual teens?
It is easy to make law, and generate public sympathy, for
cases that feature poster boys and easy, unmessy situations. Even the facts of
Lawrence and Garner v. Texas play better in the American media because both
defendants are adults. But as much as Limon’s case is a harder sell, it also
has the potential for a much larger victory because it takes up a complicated
situation that raises complicated issues. And when you get right down to it,
that’s what life is all about. Because most of us, anyway, lead complicated
lives.
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