Lambda Defends Public Sodomy in Virginia     7/22/2004
By Robert Knight

Case involves man who solicited sex in a store bathroom.

Men have a right to solicit homosexual acts in places such as public restrooms because of the Lawrence v. Texas decision striking down sodomy laws, a homosexual lawyers group contends in a Virginia case.

Lambda Legal Defense & Education Fund, in an appeal filed last week in the Virginia Court of Appeals, says that Virginia can’t enforce the state’s sodomy laws anymore.

But Attorney General Jerry Kilgore said the state’s sodomy statute still applies to public places.

“There are a number of laws on Virginia’s books on forcible sex acts and public sodomy that the Texas decision does not address,” Kilgore said. “We’ve made a decision that public acts of sodomy are still prosecutable and we’ll stand by that.”

Since the June 2003 U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Lawrence, which struck down Texas’ sodomy law, police have been confused about what’s left to enforce.

In Manassas, Virginia, for example, police temporarily pulled back from arresting men having sex in a park known for homosexual liaisons. One Manassas police officer told Concerned Women for America last fall that sodomy arrests most often occur when a man solicits sex from an undercover officer. The charge used to be “solicitation of a felony.”

“But if sodomy is no longer a felony (because of Lawrence), how can you arrest someone for soliciting what isn’t a crime?” the officer said. “This would mean we would have to actually observe the sex taking place. It’s got us paralyzed.”

Another challenge pending

Some recent cases, including the one involving the store bathroom, may clear up the confusion, however.

Responding to an Internet message, Joel D. Singson met an undercover officer at a public restroom at a Sears store in Virginia Beach in March, 2003. While the two men were in adjoining stalls, Singson asked the officer to have sex. Two officers then accosted Singson as he left the restroom and questioned him. Several months later, Singson was charged with solicitation. In February, a Virginia Circuit Court judge convicted and sentenced Singson to three years in prison, with all but six months suspended.

Lambda Legal is seeking to overturn Singson’s conviction and any other application of the sodomy law.

“There are other laws that can apply here — the prostitution statute and indecent exposure — that cover public acts," Greg Nivens, senior staff attorney at Lambda Legal's Atlanta office, told Associated Press. "What's not available is use of the actual sodomy statute. ... The sodomy law is dead."

Andy Tjan, another Virginia man who was convicted and given a three-year suspended sentence in 2003 after propositioning an officer in a Virginia Beach department store bathroom, is also appealing his conviction to the Virginia Court of Appeals.

University of Virginia professor of constitutional law Kim Forde-Mazrui, who advocates rewriting the sodomy law, said the law was being “selectively applied.”

“A private invitation for sex that takes place in a public place doesn’t mean it’s a public sex act, or solicitation of a public sex act,” Mazrui said.

What about in a prison yard?

Trondell Askew, who was convicted of sodomizing another inmate in the yard of Southhampton Correctional Center before the Lawrence ruling, had his conviction upheld by the Virginia Appeals Court on February 10, 2004. He had been sentenced to three additional years on the sentence he was serving. The court ruled that Askew’s attorney had not raised the constitutionality challenge to the statute at the first trial, and so he could not raise it in an appeal. Askew had invoked the Lawrence ruling in his bid to review the conviction.

Commenting on the Singson case, Lambda attorney Nevins lamented that the Lawrence case had not settled the sodomy issue once and for all.

“As an organization that secured the Lawrence victory last year, it’s very disconcerting to be arguing against an attempt to undermine the Supreme Court,” Nevins said.

Lambda is among the homosexual organizations that is still opposing the Boy Scouts’ policy of barring homosexual men from being Scout leaders, even though the Supreme Court in 2000 affirmed the Scouts’ right to their own leadership standards.

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