New York’s Staten Island. In New York, cheating on your spouse is no longer grounds for incarceration, but taking a Louisville slugger to both headlights is.
That’s correct: The 117-year-old legislation that made adultery a class-B misdemeanor, punishable by up to three months in jail and a $500 fine, has been repealed. Feel free to criticize all the Carrie Underwood you want.
In a written statement, Governor Kathy Hochul stated, “I know that people often have complex relationships, even though I’ve been fortunate to share a loving married life with my husband for 40 years, making it somewhat ironic for me to sign a bill decriminalizing adultery.” It is obvious that these people, not our criminal justice system, should handle these issues. Let’s finally remove this absurd, out-of-date law off the books.
At a period when proving a spouse had cheated was the only method to obtain a legal separation, adultery prohibitions were implemented to make it more difficult to obtain a divorce and are still written laws in many places around the country. Similar to New York, other states have recently taken steps to remove their adultery statutes.
However, there have been few charges and much fewer convictions.
According to New York, adultery occurs when one person has sex with another while having a living spouse or while the other person has a living spouse. According to a New York Times article, a married man and a 25-year-old woman were arrested using the state’s statute for the first time a few weeks after it went into force.
The bill was sponsored by Charles Lavine, a Long Island Democrat in the state assembly. Just four members of the 63-member Senate, led by State Senator Liz Krueger (D-Manhattan), voted against their own version of the law on April 4, while just 10 members of the 150-member Assembly voted against a version of the measure in March.
Every lawmaker on Staten Island supported the bills.
— This report included content from the Associated Press.
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