Appeal Begins for Teen Sentenced to Prison for Gay Sex
365Gay.com,
December 2, 2003
By 365Gay.com Newscenter Staff
Topeka, Kansas—Appearing before
the Kansas Court of Appeals today, the American Civil Liberties Union urged
the court to follow the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent gay rights case,
Lawrence v. Texas, and reduce the sentence of a young man serving an
additional 15 years in prison solely because he is gay. The case was sent back
to the Kansas court for reconsideration by the U.S. Supreme Court immediately
following its decision in Lawrence this past June.
“The Supreme Court made it very clear that you can no
longer punish someone differently for being gay,” said Tamara Lange, a staff
attorney with the ACLU’s Lesbian & Gay Rights Project. “Yet Matthew
Limon continues to sit in jail because when he was a teenager he had
consensual sex with another male rather than a female. It is time for the
Kansas ‘Romeo and Juliet’ law to be applied to Romeos and Romeos as
well.”
Matthew Limon is appealing a 206-month prison sentence he
received shortly after turning 18 because while he was a resident at a private
school for developmentally disabled youth he performed consensual oral sex on
another teenager. Limon would have served a maximum of 15 months in jail under
the Kansas law had the other teenager been female. But because the “Romeo
and Juliet” law applies only to heterosexuals, Limon was convicted under the
much harsher state sodomy law.
Under the Kansas “Romeo and Juliet” law, consensual
sex between two teens is a lesser crime if the younger teenager is 14 to 16
years old, if the older teenager is under 19, if the age difference is less
than four years, if there are no third parties involved, and if the two
teenagers “are members of the opposite sex.”
According to the ACLU, the Kansas “Romeo and Juliet”
law is similar to the Texas law the U.S. Supreme Court struck down in June in
its historic decision in Lawrence v. Texas because the Kansas law treats the
sexual conduct of lesbian and gay people differently. The day after its
decision in the Texas case, the U.S. Supreme Court vacated Limon’s
conviction and instructed the Kansas Court of Appeals to give it further
consideration in light of its ruling on sexual intimacy in Lawrence.
Kansas Attorney General Phill Kline in his submission to
the court claims that the state should be able to punish gay teenagers more
harshly under the “Romeo and Juliet” law because doing so would encourage
heterosexual teenagers to marry.
In statements to the press, Kline has said that changing
the law would lead to bestiality and the destruction of marriage.
“Contrary to Attorney General Phill Kline’s many
efforts to confuse the real issues behind this case, we’re not saying the
state shouldn’t protect teens or punish those who break the law. We are only
asking that the state treat gay teens the same as it does straight teens,”
said Dick Kurtenbach, Executive Director of the ACLU of Kansas and Western
Missouri. “Matthew Limon isn’t asking for a get out of jail free
card—he’s saying he should have been convicted and punished—but not
under the Romeo and Juliet law.”
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