Quality Weenie

Adultry Will Get You Life In Michigan

If you are married and plan on cheating on your spouse you better think twice about it because that act could get you life in prison.

In a ruling sure to make philandering spouses squirm, Michigan's second-highest court says that anyone involved in an extramarital fling can be prosecuted for first-degree criminal sexual conduct, a felony punishable by up to life in prison.

As if Michigan isn't having enough problems with governmental budgets we will now be paying money for people to be prosecuted for having an affair. No wonder the Governor has to raise taxes.

"We cannot help but question whether the Legislature actually intended the result we reach here today," Judge William Murphy wrote in November for a unanimous Court of Appeals panel, "but we are curtailed by the language of the statute from reaching any other conclusion."

"Technically," he added, "any time a person engages in sexual penetration in an adulterous relationship, he or she is guilty of CSC I," the most serious sexual assault charge in Michigan's criminal code.

I don't see people rushing around to get that law changed either. And you know that spouses that have been cheated on are right now running to lawyers and the police to get revenge and have their cheating spouse thrown in jail.

But still how did this ruling come about?

The ruling grows out of a case in which a Charlevoix man accused of trading Oxycontin pills for the sexual favors of a cocktail waitress was charged under an obscure provision of Michigan's criminal law. The provision decrees that a person is guilty of first-degree criminal sexual conduct whenever "sexual penetration occurs under circumstances involving the commission of any other felony."

(emphasis mine)

But still how does selling drugs for sex equate to life in prision for adultry?

Look at this "a person is guilty of first-degree criminal sexual conduct whenever "sexual penetration occurs under circumstances involving the commission of any other felony"

Charlevoix prosecuting attorney John Jarema said he decided to appeal after police discovered evidence that Waltonen may have struck drugs-for-sex deals with several other women.

Cox's office, which handled the appeal on the prosecutor's behalf, insisted that the waitress' consent was irrelevant. All that mattered, the attorney general argued in a brief demanding that the charge be reinstated, was that the pair had sex "under circumstances involving the commission of another felony" -- the delivery of the Oxycontin pills.

The Attorney General's Office got a whole lot more than it bargained for. The Court of Appeals agreed that the prosecutor in Waltonen's case needed only to prove that the Oxycontin delivery and the consensual sex were related. But Murphy and his colleagues went further, ruling that a first-degree CSC charge could be justified when consensual sex occurred in conjunction with any felony, not just a drug sale.

To understand how the whole Adultry equals life in prison you need to understand this:

Among the many crimes Michigan still recognizes as felonies, they noted pointedly, is adultery -- although the Prosecuting Attorneys Association of Michigan notes that no one has been convicted of that offense since 1971.

Yes, Michigan has on in it's laws that Adultry is a felony.

So what are they going to do about it?

But Michigan's Supreme Court majority has held that it is for the Legislature, not the courts, to decide when the absurdity threshold has been breached.

Whitbeck noted that Murphy's opinion questions whether state lawmakers really meant to authorize the prosecution of adulterers for consensual relationships.

"We encourage the Legislature to take a second look at the statutory language if they are troubled by our ruling," he wrote.

So far the Legislature isn't doing anything about it.

Posted by Quality Weenie at January 18, 2007 09:53 AM | TrackBack