“The sheriff’s office is either harassing people for their lifestyle. “One of two things are going on here,” says D’Amico. Thomas D’Amico, a Baton Rouge attorney, represented one of the men arrested in the sting operations. ( LIST: Top 10 Controversial Supreme Court Cases) The Sheriff’s Office will not use these unconstitutional sections of the law in future cases.” Baton Rouge prosecutors did not press any charges.
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The statement also said “the deputies in the cases were acting in good faith using a statute that was still on the books of the Louisiana criminal code.” This post has since been deleted: in a new statement, the Sheriff’s Office apologized “to anyone that was unintentionally harmed or offended by the actions of our investigations,” and regretted “that the way these investigations were handled made it appear that we were targeting the gay community.” The statement added that while sodomy laws “have not been removed from the Louisiana law code, they have been deemed unenforceable and unconstitutional. “To our knowledge, the Sheriff’s office was never contacted or told that the law was not enforceable or prosecutable,” the East Baton Rouge Sheriff’s office said in a statement released on Facebook. And the Baton Rouge case shows that in some pockets of the U.S., gays still have reason to be wary of police.
#Court case with two gay men having sex arrested code
Louisiana’s then-attorney general announced that a similar law in his state was not enforceable. But today the statute is still in Louisiana’s criminal code and similar laws remain on the books in at least a dozen other states. In 2003, the landmark Lawrence v Texas Supreme Court case declared a Texas statute prohibiting oral or anal sex – a so-called “sodomy law” - unconstitutional. Most of these men were arrested after being approached by a male undercover cop at a public park and agreeing to have sex at a private residence. But it was on the books! Such was the response, essentially, of the East Baton Rouge Sheriff’s Office, after The Advocate newspaper reported on Sunday that at least 12 men had been arrested since 2011 under a sodomy law invalidated by the Supreme Court a decade ago.