In 2000, Matt Limon, an 18-year-old Kansas youth, received a 17-year prison sentence for having consensual sex with a 14-year-old friend. If his friend had been a girl, the maximum sentence would have been 15 months.
After five years suffering in prison, Limon will soon be free, thanks to a Kansas Supreme Court decision which (after many delays) ruled that the federal Supreme Court's 2003 Lawrence v. Texas decision forbids disproportionate sentences for gays based on "moral disapproval" and anti-gay animus.
Why has the legal process taken so long to grant justice to Matt Limon? After Lawrence, the Kansas intermediate court that rendered the Limon verdict was ordered to revisit its conclusions. However, the intermediate court ignored Lawrence because it had been decided on "privacy" grounds, whereas the Limon case involved equal protection. The Kansas Supreme Court eventually reduced Lawrence to its facts and struck down the disproportionate sentencing.
As you may recall, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, in her Lawrence concurring opinion, rejected the privacy contention and, instead, based her decision on equal protection. I felt then that equal protection, especially if it had been the majority's basis, would better serve gays in future cases. Even non-gay specific sodomy laws could have been overturned under this standard on showing they were disproportionately applied to gays (as they were). But many, in the thrall of the need to defend abortion rights premised on the privacy contention behind Roe v. Wade, felt otherwise.
The Kansas ruling for Matt Limon is simply more evidence that
equal protection, not privacy/Roe, will be the way
forward.
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