Prison Sentence Challenged for Kansas Man
The
Advocate, December 3, 2003
Appearing before the Kansas Court of Appeals on Tuesday,
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 by the U.S.
Supreme Court to the Kansas court for reconsideration 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 and 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.”
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 with its
Lawrence ruling 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.
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