Word: laws
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Whoever commits the abominable and detestable crime against nature with mankind or beast shall be deemed guilty of sodomy." In such indirect language, an Indiana statute makes oral or anal intercourse a crime. Even if he knew about the law, Charles Cotner of Jasper County, Ind., could hardly believe that it covered married couples in the privacy of their bedrooms...
Closed Doors. The same thing could have happened to Cotner in most other states. Virtually all of them have anti-sodomy statutes similar to Indiana's-many phrased with matching euphemism. Illinois and a few others except all consenting adults, and most law-enforcement agencies do not bother with such cases. Cotner nonetheless faced a long term, since convicted sex offenders rarely win parole until most of their sentence...
...when Playboy magazine heard about his predicament, Publisher Hugh Hefner's Playboy Foundation helped underwrite a habeas corpus petition. On the narrow legal ground that he was allowed to plead guilty without having been informed that he could have attacked the sodomy law constitutionally, the U.S. Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals has just thrown out Cotner's conviction by a 2-to-l vote. He is now free, after having served three years of his sentence, and is living with his grandmother in Illinois...
...court carefully avoided ruling on the constitutionality of the law, but it left little doubt about its opinion. It cited Griswold v. Connecticut, a 1965 Supreme Court decision holding that married couples cannot be prosecuted for using birth-control devices because there is a substantial right to marital privacy, "The import of the Griswold decision," said the Seventh Circuit, "is that private, consensual, marital relations are protected from regulation by the state...
Joint Account. As superfamilies go, the Mellons are remarkably unknown to the public. Thomas Mellon, the paterfamilias, worked his way to a law degree at the Western University of Pennsylvania (now the University of Pittsburgh) by doing odd jobs and tutoring less apt students. Soon after hanging out his shingle, he concluded that there was more money to be made in investment than in litigation. In 1870, he opened his own bank, T. Mellon & Sons. Tall, thin and austere as a Grant Wood painting, he wore high starched collars when lesser men had long since moved to sack suits...