ALBANY, New York, USA (AP) — New York repealed on Friday a little-used century-old law that made it a crime to deceive your spouse, a misdemeanor that at one point could have landed adulterers in jail for three months.
Governor Kathy Hochul signed a bill that repeals the statute, which dates back to 1907 and has long been considered outdated and difficult to enforce.
"Although I have been fortunate to share a loving marital life with my husband for 40 years, which is somewhat ironic for me to sign a bill that decriminalizes adultery, I know that people often have complex relationships," she said. "These matters should be clearly handled by individuals and not by our criminal justice system. Let's eliminate this absurd and outdated statute from our law books once and for all."
Adultery prohibitions are actually laws in several states and were enacted to make divorce more difficult at a time when proving that a spouse had cheated was the only way to obtain a legal separation. Charges have been rare and convictions even rarer. Some states have also moved to repeal their adultery laws in recent years.
New York defined adultery as when a person "engages in sexual relations with another person at a time when they have a living spouse, or the other person has a living spouse." The state law was first used a few weeks after its enactment, according to an article in the New York Times, to arrest a married man and a 25-year-old woman.
Charles Lavine, a member of the State Assembly and sponsor of the bill, said that around a dozen people have been charged under the law since the 1970s, and only five of those cases resulted in convictions.
This state law seems to have been last used in 2010, against a woman who was caught engaging in a sexual act in a park, but the charge of adultery was later dropped as part of a plea agreement.
New York was close to repealing the law in the 1960s after a state commission tasked with evaluating the penal code stated that it was nearly impossible to enforce.
At that moment, lawmakers were initially in agreement to remove the ban, but ultimately decided to keep it after a politician argued that repealing it would make it seem like the state was officially endorsing infidelity, according to a 1965 New York Times article.
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This story was translated from English by an AP editor with the help of a generative artificial intelligence tool.