Effort to strike Virginia's fornication law fails
By Kathy Hieatt
The Virginian-Pilot
© February 6, 2014
RICHMOND
Fornication is a term more often used in church than in court these days, but it still occupies space in Virginia’s criminal code and allows the state to fine anyone who has sex outside of marriage $250.
An effort to strike that part of the law failed in a House subcommittee Wednesday over concerns it would create loopholes for related statutes dealing with incest and other sex crimes.
HB914 was one of the last of a handful of bills this session seeking to eliminate antiquated tenets of Virginia law. Lawmakers also have rejected others looking to decriminalize suicide and adultery.
The laws “represent a past that not everyone’s let go of,” a past that can take a long time to change, said Claire Guthrie Gastañaga, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Virginia.
Suicide is a common-law crime with no set penalty. Adultery is a misdemeanor, punishable, like fornication, by a $250 fine.
While prosecutions for the latter offenses are rare, they still occur. There were eight convictions for fornication last year, said Del. David Albo, R-Fairfax County, who chairs the House Constitutional Law Subcommittee, which struck down HB914.
In Hampton Roads in 2011, one Newport News man was charged with two counts of fornicating, according to a Virginian-Pilot analysis of Virginia Supreme Court data. The charges ultimately were withdrawn.
The region’s courts handled two adultery cases that year. In one, a Virginia Beach woman was found not guilty by a judge. In the other, a Chesapeake man pleaded guilty and received a six-day jail sentence, but that case involved incest, according to the data.
Prosecutors sometimes use the charges in plea agreements when the original offenses were more severe, according to the subcommittee’s legal counsel. The U.S. Supreme Court has invalidated state laws penalizing sexual behavior between two consenting adults, Gastañaga said. Adultery instead is most often used as a weapon in divorce and custody proceedings, she added.
“This is just cleaning up the code,” Gastañaga said Wednesday in support of HB914. “You put your hand on the Bible and took an oath to uphold the constitution. … You didn’t agree to uphold the Bible.”
While prosecution for adultery or fornication may be embarrassing, suicide is a different issue because it labels decedents – who often took their lives because of mental illness – as criminals, said Sharon Webster, who spoke last month on behalf of efforts to decriminalize suicide. Webster, of Arlington, said her daughter killed herself just days before her graduation from the University of Virginia. She’d struggled with depression for years. Webster said she wants her daughter to be remembered as the wonderful, beloved woman she was, not as a criminal. The stigma that title carries deepens the pain and guilt survivors of suicide already feel, she added.
She collected a petition with nearly 500 signatures in support of the effort. All three bills in the House and Senate have failed.
“I found out quite by chance that suicide is still considered a common-law crime in Virginia. At the time, I thought this was a cruel joke,” Webster told the House Criminal Law Subcommittee in January. Changing the law would “show that Virginia no longer penalizes a lack of resiliency.”
One morality bill that is making progress is SB14, which would decriminalize sodomy between consenting adults. The Senate Courts of Justice and Finance committees already have approved the measure, which may get a floor vote as soon as Friday.
If passed by that chamber, SB14 still will have to survive the conservative House Courts of Justice Committee.
The General Assembly slowly is making progress, Gastañaga said. Last year, the body erased from the criminal code the statute making it illegal for two unwed adults to live together. It also agreed this year to ask the Virginia State Crime Commission to study doing the same for fornication.
“I think we generally support the idea of taking these no longer enforceable, moral laws off the books,” said Anna Scholl, executive director of ProgressVA, a progressive advocacy group. “Government shouldn’t be peeking through your bedroom window to see what’s going on.”
http://hamptonroads.com/2014/02/effort-strike-virginias-fornication-law-fails
= new reply since forum marked as read
Do they arrest the dead person? I yam mightily confoozled.
