In Houston, Texas, police officers were dispatched to a private address in response to a weapons disturbance. Two men, Lawrence and Garner, were arrested at the residence for engaging in a sexual act. They were charged under the Texas Penal Code Annotated Section 21.06(a) which states ‘A person commits an offense if he engages in deviate sexual intercourse with another individual of the same sex.’ Lawrence and Garner were convicted before a Justice of the Peace.
The petitioners exercised their right to a trial de novo in Harris County Criminal Court. They challenged the Penal Code as a violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment and of Article 1, Section 3(a) of the Texas Constitution. Harris County Criminal Court rejected their arguments. The petitioners appealed to the Court of Appeals for the Texas Fourteenth District which considered the petitioners’ federal constitutional arguments under both the Equal Protection and Due Process Clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment. The court rejected the constitutional arguments and affirmed the convictions. The majority in that decision considered the precedent in Bowers v Hardwick to control the due process aspect of the case.
The US Supreme Court granted a review of the case after determining that the petitioners’ circumstances warranted it. There were three questions for the court to consider:
- Whether petitioners’ criminal convictions under the Texas ‘Homosexual Conduct’ law—which criminalizes sexual intimacy by same-sex couples, but not identical behaviour by different-sex couples—violated the Fourteenth Amendment guarantee of equal protection of the laws.
- Whether petitioners’ criminal convictions for adult consensual sexual intimacy in the home violate their vital interests in liberty and privacy protected by the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.
- Whether Bowers v. Hardwick, should be overruled?
Considering the first question, the court concluded that the case in question required them to analyse whether Bowers itself has continuing validity, and as such focus on the Due Process Clause. The court held that ‘were we to hold the statute invalid under the Equal Protection Clause some might question whether a prohibition would be valid if drawn differently, say, to prohibit the conduct both between same-sex and different-sex participants.’ It stated that equality of treatment and due process are linked and that a decision on the latter would advance both interests.
Addressing the question on Due Process, the court held that the petitioners were entitled to respect for their private lives. The judgment stated that ‘their right to liberty under the Due Process Clause gives them the full right to engage in their conduct without intervention of the government’ and that there was no legitimate state interest that justified intrusion into the person and private life of the individual.
The court found that Bowers was not correct when it was decided and it ought not to remain precedent. It held that in Bowers the court had misapprehended the liberty claim presented to it by claiming that ‘the issue presented is whether the Federal Constitution confers a fundamental right upon homosexuals to engage in sodomy…’ The court found that whilst the law in this case and in Bowers prohibited no more than a sexual act, their penalties had more far-reaching consequences on the right to privacy.
Consequently, the judgment of the Court of Appeals for the Texas Fourteenth District was reversed and the case was remanded for further proceedings not inconsistent with the opinion.
Download the judgment