Facts
- Police entered John Lawrence’s Houston apartment after a reported “weapons disturbance.”
- Officers stated they observed Lawrence and Tyron Garner, two adult men, engaging in private, consensual sexual conduct.
- Texas arrested and charged both men under Texas Penal Code § 21.06 (“Homosexual Conduct”), which criminalized specified sexual acts only when performed by same-sex partners.
- Lawrence and Garner pleaded no contest, were convicted of a misdemeanor, and were fined.
- The Texas Court of Appeals (en banc) affirmed, treating Bowers v. Hardwick as controlling precedent.
Issues
- Whether criminalizing private, consensual sexual intimacy between same-sex adults in the home violates the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.
- Whether a statute that criminalizes specified sexual conduct only for same-sex couples violates the Equal Protection Clause.
- Whether Bowers v. Hardwick should be overruled.
Decision
- The Supreme Court reversed the Texas Court of Appeals and remanded.
- The Court held that § 21.06 violated the Due Process Clause by criminalizing private, consensual adult intimacy in the home.
- The Court expressly overruled Bowers v. Hardwick.
- The Court resolved the case on substantive due process grounds, while recognizing that the law’s unequal targeting of same-sex couples informed the analysis.
- Justice O’Connor concurred in the judgment on equal protection grounds, concluding the statute failed rational-basis review because it targeted same-sex couples and rested on moral disapproval.
- Justice Scalia (joined by the Chief Justice and Justice Thomas) dissented, arguing that moral judgments can supply a rational basis and warning of broader implications for other morality-based laws.
- Justice Thomas separately dissented, characterizing the law as unwise but not unconstitutional.
Legal Principles
- The Due Process Clause protects adult liberty to engage in private, consensual intimate conduct in the home without criminal punishment.
- Substantive due process analysis must not define the asserted liberty interest so narrowly that it reduces the claim to a mere description of the prohibited act.
- A state must show a legitimate interest sufficient to justify criminal intrusion into private, consensual adult sexual intimacy; moral disapproval alone is not enough under the Court’s due process reasoning.
- Bowers v. Hardwick is no longer valid precedent on the constitutionality of criminal bans on consensual adult same-sex intimacy.
- A law that criminalizes identical conduct only when performed by same-sex couples raises equal protection concerns; such selective criminalization may fail rational-basis review.
Conclusion
The Court invalidated Texas’s same-sex-only sodomy statute as an unconstitutional intrusion on protected liberty under the Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process Clause and overruled Bowers, removing constitutional support for criminal punishment of private, consensual adult same-sex intimacy.