Life Without Privacy
Life Without Fair Courts Editorial Cartoon Series by Mikhaela Reid
Lawrence v. Texas, 539 U.S. 558 (2003).
Prosecuted by: The state of Texas
Defendants: John Geddes Lawrence and Tyron Garner
Issue: Does a state violate an individual’s freedom and liberty if it criminalizes adult, consensual sex between people of the same gender?
Case Summary:
John Lawrence and Tyron Garner were arrested in Lawrence’s Houston home and jailed overnight after police officers responding to a false report found the men having sex. Lawrence and Garner were convicted of violating Texas’s “Homosexual Conduct” law, which made it a crime for two people of the same gender to have oral or anal sex, even though those acts were perfectly legal for heterosexuals. Battling for years in the Texas courts, Lambda Legal sought to overturn their criminal conviction (which made the two men “sex offenders” in many states) and to have the Texas law declared unconstitutional. We took the case all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. In 2003, the Court struck down the Texas law and all remaining sodomy laws in the country.
The justices held that laws criminalizing sex between consenting adults violated an individual’s liberty. The Supreme Court also reversed its earlier decision in Bowers v. Hardwick, which had allowed states to enact sodomy laws. Liberty, the Court said, prevents the government from intruding in the most private of places, the home, for regulating the most private of human contact, consensual sexual activity between two adults.
