Some people convicted of sodomy remain on Mississippi’s sex offender registry and could face lawsuits at any time, according to lawyers who have fought homosexual conduct laws across the country.
Taylor Vance and Molly Mintas
Mississippi paid more than $400,000 this year to lawyers who sued the state over its unconstitutional sodomy law, which criminalizes oral and anal sex, and could pay much more in future similar lawsuits.
After Mississippi Attorneys General Jim Hood and Lynn Fitch spent years defending an outdated sodomy law (Mississippi Statute 97-29-59), the state legislature appropriated funds and paid civil rights lawyers from several legal organizations.
But Mississippi may end up paying even more, according to Matthew Strager, an attorney who supported the lawsuit, because lawmakers this session died in committee a bill that would have repealed the state’s decades-old “unnatural intercourse” law, which was used primarily to target LGBTQ+ Mississippi residents and sex workers.
Although Mississippi authorities can no longer prosecute people for consensual sex acts, some people with past sexual convictions are still required to register as sex offenders.
That means that even though state officials no longer require people convicted of sodomy to register as sex offenders, people who remain on Mississippi’s sex offender registry for sodomy convictions could sue the state at any time, due to the strange circumstances of the lawsuit, Strager said.
Mississippi “still faces the risk of being sued by other people who remain on the registry,” said Strager, who received a portion of his fee in early April through the Center for Constitutional Rights. Some of those on the registry have criminal convictions dating back decades.
The U.S. Supreme Court declared laws criminalizing private consensual sex unconstitutional in the 2003 case Lawrence v. Texas. Even the conservative U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals found Mississippi’s law unconstitutional when it reviewed and upheld an award of attorney fees challenged by Fitch’s firm last year.
Initially considered a common law crime, sodomy has been illegal in Mississippi since the state’s founding and was enacted into law in 1839. In the 1890 state constitution, sodomy was List of crimesIn cases of rape, adultery, fornication, etc., courts were permitted to exclude the public from attending or witnessing trials.
Struger sued several states over their sodomy laws. He noted that Mississippi’s law had more problems than it could handle: “Whoever is convicted of any abominable and abominable crime against nature, committed against mankind or beast, shall be punished by imprisonment for not more than ten years.”
Struger said the law is vague and lacks an explanation of what constitutes a “crime against nature committed against humanity.” It also makes no distinction between consensual oral and anal sex.
“There’s a lot you can do with laws that don’t specify what they prohibit,” Strager said. “You can prohibit anything you want to prohibit.”
read more: Mississippi to pay more than $400,000 in legal fees over unconstitutional sodomy law
The same law exists in Mississippi. Only bestiality is prohibitedPeople charged with bestiality in Mississippi are technically charged under sodomy laws, Struger said.
That means some of the half-dozen or so men still on the registry may have committed sexual assaults or engaged in sex acts with animals, but Mississippians looking for information about sex offenders in their area wouldn’t know that from online data that lists only those convicted of sexual intercourse.
The reason these men weren’t removed from the registry has to do with how the case unfolded: It was originally filed as a class action in 2015, and if Struger’s clients had prevailed, Mississippi would have had to remove everyone convicted of sodomy from the registry.
But as part of his efforts to work with the state, Mr. Struger negotiated the removal of the names of more than 30 Mississippi women who had been convicted under Louisiana’s unnatural carnal knowledge law and were required to register as sex offenders in Mississippi. The move brought the number of people convicted of sodomy in Mississippi below the threshold needed for a class action lawsuit, forcing Mr. Struger to represent people individually.
Struger said the men who remain on the registry are primarily poor and likely not in a position to navigate the process of contacting a civil rights lawyer.
Still, Struger said he and other lawyers fought to strike down Mississippi’s law. They hoped that U.S. District Judge Carlton Reeves, who initially ordered the state to pay attorneys’ fees, would do so. Instead, the judge ordered the state to remove the plaintiffs from the sex offender registry.
“He’s one of the bravest judges in the country, and yet he ruled by a narrow margin,” Struger said.
The easiest way for the state to protect itself from similar lawsuits in the future and avoid paying further fines is to repeal the sodomy law, an effort that Moss Point Democrat Rep. Jeramy Anderson has been working on for several years.
Anderson has introduced a number of bills that would essentially repeal sodomy laws by simply removing the “mankind” part of the statute but leaving the bestiality part intact.
“This law is discriminatory and outdated,” Anderson told Mississippi Today.
Last year, the Speaker’s Office referred Anderson’s bill to the House Judiciary Committee B, which handles criminal law and is chaired by Kevin Horan, a Republican congressman from Grenada and a criminal lawyer.
Horan said he doesn’t remember the bill or being called out by anyone on the subject, so it could have easily been overlooked during a chaotic legislative session. But the third-term lawmaker said he wouldn’t have moved it forward out of committee even if someone had asked him to pass it.
“I don’t know if I would take it up,” Horan said. “I don’t want to take it up in Justice B. I just don’t have the interest in it.”
Senate Appropriations Chairman Briggs Hopson, a Republican from Vicksburg who authored the bill to cover legal fees, did not respond to a request for comment about the spending bill and whether he thought the expenditures were a wise use of taxpayer money. Lawmakers appropriate taxpayer money each year for a variety of lawsuits.
this article First appearance Mississippi Today.
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