A Boy's Life

Before Matthew Limon joined the ranks of prisoners at the Ellsworth Correctional Facility in Kansas, he probably would not have marched for gay rights. He probably never would have signed a petition on gay-rights issues or subscribed to a gay magazine. And after he gets out of jail, he still might not do any of those things.

But since Limon was sentenced to seventeen years for a crime that would have cost a heterosexual just fifteen months, newspapers and magazines and countless online discussions have seized upon his story. His cell has been deluged with postcards and letters addressed to Inmate 70713. Limon could have accepted offers for organized help -- a sit-in or a protest at the University of Kansas, perhaps.

Instead, he's spent the past three and a half years playing the piano with the prison church choir. And waiting.

Limon will turn 22 in February, but he has the mental capacity of a sixth-grader. Four years ago, in February 2000, Limon and another teenager were residents at the Lakemary Center for people with developmental disabilities in Paola, Kansas. Limon had just turned eighteen, and the other boy, identified in court filings only as M.A.R., was almost fifteen when Limon performed oral sex on him. M.A.R. told authorities that the act was consensual, a statement that has never been disputed.

Still, Kansas considers it statutory rape whenever a person older than eighteen has sex with anyone under the age of sixteen.

But Kansas' "Romeo and Juliet" law covers a nebulous world in between. The general belief among Kansas judges and prosecutors is that the penalty for statutory rape should be less severe when the case involves two teenagers and one is no more than four years older than the other. The Romeo and Juliet law, passed by the Kansas Legislature and signed by Governor Bill Graves in 1999, defines "unlawful voluntary sexual relations" as intercourse, sodomy or "lewd fondling or touching" but lessens the sentence if these acts occur between an adult who is younger than nineteen and a child between the ages of fourteen and sixteen.

The statute's last line stipulates that it applies when "the child and the offender are the only parties involved and are members of the opposite sex. "

Because the law creates different sentencing guidelines for opposite-sex and same-sex relations, Limon's actions with M.A.R. earned him an adult-sized charge of criminal sodomy. A heterosexual teenager prosecuted under the Romeo and Juliet law would receive a maximum sentence of fifteen months and would not be required to register as a sex offender for the rest of his life, as Limon now does.

In one of Limon's first appearances in Miami County court, on June 27, 2000, his court-appointed lawyer, Anthony Lupo, testified that he'd counseled Limon to waive his right to a jury trial. After all, it was useless to fight the charge when he would surely be found guilty. The plan was to appeal his sentence.

Limon spent the next two years appealing his case through the Kansas courts -- and losing. On February 1, 2002, a panel of three judges, including Judge G. Joseph Pierron Jr. of the Kansas Court of Appeals, upheld Limon's conviction and sentence based on the U.S. Supreme Court's 1986 decision in Bowers v. Hardwick.

In the Bowers case, a gay man, Michael Hardwick, was arrested after a police officer entered his home to serve him a warrant for public drinking and found him and another man having oral sex in a bedroom. Though they were consenting adults having sex in the privacy of Hardwick's home, both men were arrested under Georgia's sodomy law. The case went to the U.S. Supreme Court, where Hardwick lost his appeal 5-4. Though Georgia had laws against both homosexual and heterosexual sodomy, the Supreme Court addressed only homosexuals, ruling that Americans do not have "a fundamental right to engage in homosexual sodomy."

But seventeen years later, on June 26 of last year, the Supreme Court overturned its Bowers decision. In Lawrence v. Texas, the court found Texas' homosexual sodomy law unconstitutional, effectively striking down all sodomy laws, same-sex or otherwise, still on the books in thirteen states. Four of those states -- Kansas, Missouri, Oklahoma and Texas -- had laws banning only homosexual sodomy.

"A State can, of course, assign certain consequences to a violation of its criminal law," Justice Sandra Day O'Connor wrote in a concurring opinion. "But the State cannot single out one identifiable class of citizens for punishment that does not apply to everyone else, with moral disapproval as the only asserted state interest for the law."

Limon had been convicted based on a sodomy law that the U.S. Supreme Court had now rendered impotent.

The local office of the American Civil Liberties Union, along with its national office in New York City, had petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court to look at Limon's case in 2000. The day after its Lawrence decision, the court ordered the Kansas Court of Appeals to hear Limon's case again in light of the Supreme Court's new ruling.