Late last year, my office and the ACLU of South Carolina filed a challenge to South Carolina’s continued enforcement of its anti-gay “Buggery” law that still criminalized having gay sex nearly two decades after the Supreme Court invalidated such laws. This was the fourth in a series of cases my office has litigated challenging sex offender registration for people who were convicted of being gay in the 1900s and early 2000s.
Our plaintiff, who proceeded as a John Doe, was arrested was indicted in 2001 for engaging “in oral and anal sex.” The other man was listed as his “victim” but also indicted. They both pleaded guilty. Doe even received a pardon, but South Carolina still mandated that he register a sex offender.
To its credit, unlike Mississippi, Idaho, and Montana, South Carolina quickly recognized its scheme was unconstitutional and agreed to negotiate. After a couple months of talking, they agreed that, “[t]o conform with the Supreme Court’s ruling in Lawrence v. Texas, 539 U.S. 588 (2003), [South Carolina] shall remove from the South Carolina Sex Offender Registry all individuals currently registered solely for a conviction for Buggery, S.C. Code § 16-15-120, stemming from sodomy between consenting adults.” And it agreed it would not attempt to register such people in the future should they relocate to South Carolina.
Today the judge entered the agreed order permanently enjoining South Carolina from requiring people with “Buggery” convictions to register as sex offenders. This is a huge victory for our client and other victims of this homophobic registration scheme, who all faced a lifetime of registration obligations.
“For nearly 20 years, South Carolina has used the Sex Offender Registry to track, shame, and ostracize these individuals for engaging in consensual and constitutionally-protected behavior,” said Allen Chaney, Director of Legal Advocacy for the ACLU of South Carolina. “I am pleased that the State agreed to settle the case, but discouraged that we had to sue at all.”
I’d like to thank the ACLU of South Carolina for taking this issue seriously and agreeing to co-counsel on it, and to Allen Chaney especially for his vigorous advocacy in this case.
Victory!