He was convicted of a sex act that's no longer a crime. Years later, he's deemed a sex offender.
By Kristine Phillips February 15 at 8:00 AM
Charlton Green was 20 when he was arrested after having oral sex with a 16-year-old male in a Georgia hotel room.
He was convicted of a sex crime — not because the act was not consensual (it was), nor because the teen was not within the age of consent (in Georgia, it is 16). He was convicted because the incident happened in 1997, when oral and anal sex between consenting adults was prohibited under Georgia’s sodomy law.
Georgia’s Supreme Court invalidated the state’s sodomy law a year later, and the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against all such state laws in 2003, but Green’s legal status remains the same. To this day, he is considered a sex offender. Last week, the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals reversed a federal-district court’s ruling that would have lifted the stigmatizing label from Green’s name.
Green’s case, debated for years in state and federal courts, is a remnant of antiquated laws that punished people for their sexual choices and disproportionately affected gays and lesbians, advocates say. Camilla Taylor, a lawyer for Lambda Legal, an advocacy group that advocates for LGBT rights, said many sodomy laws made criminals of gays and lesbians because of how they choose to have sex. Texas, for example, prohibited consensual sex acts between individuals of the same sex.
“In an era where sodomy laws could be enforced, people who acknowledged being gay tipped off police forces or were fired from their job. It’s considered an acknowledgment that they were presumed criminals and that presumed criminality maimed every aspect of their public life,” Taylor told The Washington Post.
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2018/02/15/he-was-convicted-of-a-sex-act-thats-no-longer-a-crime-years-later-hes-deemed-a-sex-offender/?hpid=hp_hp-more-top-stories-2_georgia-945am%3Ahomepage%2Fstory&utm_term=.2fcec34874d3
