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For more than a decade it has been illegal to commit adultery in New York. However, only five cases of cheating have resulted in criminal convictions despite a dozen or more charges being brought before the courts since 1972.

Cheating will, however, no longer be seen as a crime after New York indicated it intends to repeal the law.

The proposed bill is now working its way through the New York Legislature, which would finally repeal the seldom-used law that is punishable by up to three months behind bars.

Adultery laws remain in effect in various states in the United States, however, charges and convictions are extremely rare. They were originally designed to minimise the frequency of divorces during a time when a cheating spouse was the only method to obtain a legal separation.

Adultery, a misdemeanour in New York since 1907, is described in state code as “engages in sexual intercourse with another person at a time when he has a living spouse, or the other person has a living spouse.” A married man and a 25-year-old woman were the first to be detained under the new rule, just weeks after the man’s wife filed for divorce.

According to Assemblyman Charles Lavine, who sponsored the bill to appeal the ban, the last adultery charge in New York appears to have been filed in 2010 against a woman who was caught engaging in a sex act in a public park, but it was later dropped as part of a plea deal.

Lavine says it’s time to throw out the law given that it’s never enforced and because prosecutors shouldn’t be digging into what willing adults do behind closed doors.

“It just makes no sense whatsoever and we’ve come a long way since intimate relationships between consenting adults are considered immoral,” he said.

“It’s a joke. This law was someone’s expression of moral outrage.”

Adultery prohibitions, according to Katharine B. Silbaugh, a law professor at Boston University and co-author of “A Guide to America’s Sex Laws,” are punitive measures geared at women, designed to deter extramarital affairs that could call a child’s parentage into doubt.

“Let’s just say this: patriarchy,” Silbaugh added.

New York’s bill to eliminate the ban has already passed the Assembly and is expected to pass the Senate before being sent to the governor’s office for signature.

The provision was almost repealed in the 1960s after a state panel entrusted with modernising the entire penal code discovered it was nearly hard to execute. The commission’s chairman was cited at the time as saying, “This is a matter of private morality, not of law.”

The Assembly first approved the panel’s revisions, but the chamber reinstated the adultery statute after a legislator complained that eliminating it would make the state appear to endorse infidelity, according to a 1965 New York Times article.

There also are lingering questions over whether adultery laws are even constitutional.

A 2003 Supreme Court decision that struck down sodomy laws cast doubt on whether adultery laws could pass constitutional muster. However, in the court’s landmark 2022 decision that stripped away abortion protections, Justice Clarence Thomas wrote that the Supreme Court “ should reconsider ” its sodomy law decision, as well as its decision legalizing same-sex marriage, in light of its newer interpretation of Constitutional protections around liberty and privacy.

Adulterers will likely rejoice at not having to face the law for stepping over the line, but cheating still makes you a dirtbag – legal or not.

[source:nbc]