Unequal Injustice

March 2004

It is difficult to get people to think rationally about how the law should, and should not, deal with adolescent sexual expression.

In most states, any time a person under a certain age (which varies from 14 to 21) has sex, a crime– by definition– has occurred. Consent is deemed irrelevant; headlines that blare, “Child Rape!” are applied both to cases wherein horrific violence has been suffered and to cases involving only mutually consentual affection. Indeed, we increasingly read of adolescents’ consentual sex with other adolescents being branded “rape” and prosecuted as a heinous crime. Such prosecutorial propaganda has the effect of scaring people from questioning whether every time a teen has sex we should judge that a crime has occurred– who wants to be perceived as defending “child rape”?

But two recent cases wherein absurd perversions of criminal law have led to tragic outcomes for the adolescents involved may help more people re-examine the wisdom, or lack thereof, of treating all adolescent sexual expression as criminal.

Matthew Limon had just turned 18 when he had oral sex with another boy just weeks shy of his 15th birthday. By all accounts the interaction was consentual. But Limon was sentenced by Kansas authorities to 17 years and two months in prison. Had the sex been heterosexual, Limon would not have been subject to such Draconian punishment; under Kansas’s “Romeo and Juliet” legal provision straight teenage lovebirds are explicitly exempted from the punishment reserved for queer teens.

A Kansas appeals court was ordered to reconsider Limon’s case in light of the US Supreme Court’s voiding of sodomy statutes in Lawrence v Texas. But they upheld Limon’s 17-year sentence, defending their patently anti-gay animus with claptrap about disease-prevention and the sanctity of marriage-directed, possibly-procreative heterosexuality. (Never mind that most sexual disease is transmitted heterosexually and that the risk of pregnancy would seem to argue for stricter prohibitions for hetero sex.)

And in Georgia, 18-year-old high school senior Marcus Dixon, boasting a 3.96 grade point average and an athletic scholarship, was charged last year with multiple criminal counts for his alleged sexual assault of a classmate a few months shy of her 16th birthday. The jury found Dixon innocent of rape. They found him innocent of sexual battery, innocent of aggravated assault, and innocent of false imprisonment; in every way, they concluded that the sex was consentual– lending credence to claims that the reason that this heterosexual teen couple was targeted for prosecution by Floyd County officials in the first place was because he was black and she was white.

But the law compelled the jury to find Dixon guilty of statutory rape simply because his partner was under 16 years old. And because his “victim” was a virgin, she was presumed to have been “injured,” thus making Dixon guilty of “aggravated child molestation.”

After the verdict jurors were stunned to find out that the consentual-activity-that-nonetheless-technically-violated-the-law was to be punished with a mandatory 10-year sentence. Indeed, five jurors said that they would have ignored the law and voted not to convict had they known how unjust the sentence was going to be.

In Matthew Limon’s and Marcus Dixon’s cases, anti-gay and racial bigotries were exploited with results that any rational person can recognize as horribly unjust. But let us be clear that the solution is not to apply equally harsh penalties regardless of sexuality or race. Justice will come only from legal and prosecutorial reforms that focus on punishing real violence, not hysterically scapegoating all adolescent sexual expression.

Pasted from <http://guidemag.com/magcontent/invokemagcontent.cfm?ID=D7512038-6934-446D-946243438C37C414>