A Boy's Life

Lange says Limon understands his case, though that takes extra effort on her part. "Matt is attentive and wants to know what's going on, and I'm careful to explain it in the simplest way possible," Lange says. "He's very articulate, so it's not always easy to tell [what he's having difficulty with]."

One thing that's hard for Limon's legal team to understand is why Kansas Attorney General Phill Kline has taken such an interest in keeping Limon in jail.

"It wouldn't be possible for me to tell Matt that there's nothing personal about the state continuing to try and fight this case," Lange says. "The state is trying to keep Matt in jail, though it is clearly wrong to spend seventeen years in prison instead of one year because of sexual orientation."

"[Limon's] statement that he was sentenced to seventeen years in prison for 'who he is' is correct," Kline writes in the brief laying out the state's defense in the current appeal. Kline says Limon received the harsher sentence not simply because of his sexual orientation but because "he is a repeat offender who commits sex offenses against children."

Kline is referring to Limon's two prior convictions in juvenile court, both for having sex with people under the age of sixteen. Both crimes occurred on the same day seven years ago, when Limon was fourteen. The court records are sealed because they involve juveniles, so it's impossible to know the details of what occurred and with whom.

"This isn't a comparison of a seventeen-year sentence with a one-year sentence," Kline tells the Pitch, sitting in his Topeka office on a snowy December day. "Mr. Limon would have received five years if [the Lakemary incident] was his first conviction. This was his third conviction. I don't know his sexual orientation. The act he was engaged in, in this instance, was homosexual. But because of his predatory nature toward children, he is considered to be a sex predator in Kansas under Kansas law."

Lange calls Kline's argument "a smoke screen."

"Even if this case involved a heterosexual teen with the exact same prior offenses, same criminal record, that heterosexual teen would get thirteen to fifteen months in this case," Lange says. If Limon had no prior convictions, Lange says, he would still have to serve five years as opposed to probation, which a heterosexual teen would receive as a sentence. "The same gross disparity exists. His sentence is because Romeo and Juliet was made inapplicable to gay teenagers."

The Romeo and Juliet law was buried in Senate Bill 149, a sixty-page omnibus bill introduced to the Kansas Senate at 11:30 p.m. on May 13, 1999, the last day of the session. The Legislature adjourned fifteen minutes later, recalls Senator Karin Brownlee, a Johnson County Republican.

Brownlee voted against the bill because it was impossible to tell what was in it. "So many other bills were bundled together that I felt it was irresponsible to pass it in that manner, in the waning hours of session," Brownlee says.

Republican Senator David Adkins, a lawyer, was on the Kansas House Judiciary Committee and participated in discussions about Senate Bill 149. Adkins says the bill was created to restructure Kansas' sentencing guidelines. Prisons were filling up, he says, and in order to create bed space, the committee shortened sentences for nondrug offenses. But to keep up the appearance that the Legislature was tough on crime, those provisions were wrapped around a few sentence-lengthening measures.

In the process, the Romeo and Juliet provision was created. There had been no previous legal accommodation, Adkins explains, for parents of an eighteen-year-old who gets his fifteen-year-old girlfriend pregnant. "Her parents go ballistic and want to prosecute under statutory-rape charges," Adkins says. "There was the feeling that if the parties really, truly admitted everything was consensual, special circumstances should be considered."

Adkins now says it's "strange" that the law applies only to members of the opposite sex. "It was a way of saying, 'Let's not raise the issue -- let's not go there,' attempting to solve the consensual issue and not get to the larger sodomy issue," he says of the Legislature's efforts.

As a state senator in 1999, Kline voted against Senate Bill 149. He claims he did so not only because the bill reduced the lengths of sentences but also because he disagreed with the idea of sentencing a heterosexual differently from a homosexual on a sodomy charge.

Explaining the Legislature's rationale for leaving same-sex offenders out of the Romeo and Juliet law, Kline says, "The reality is that most children are oriented toward heterosexuality, and sexual development is a fragile development. In fact, it's one of the areas that's most often abused. And so to nurture and protect, we have laws, age-of-consent laws and so forth, which say children do not have the emotional capacity to consent to sexual relations.

"Additionally, we segregate children by gender in activities to protect their developing sexuality and to provide role models," Kline continues. "And where an abuse occurs ... the potential harm to the child is greater when a role model, or someone of the same gender, commits that abuse. Additionally, it most likely affects their sexual development more greatly than if it were heterosexual."