John G. Lawrence, 68, whose last name became synonymous with one of the LGBT right’s movements most important legal victories–the Supreme Court’s 2003 ruling in Lawrence v. Texas–died November 20 from complications of a heart ailment.
The high court’s decision struck down a Texas law that made it a crime to engage in consensual homosexual sex. The ruling likewise invalidated similar laws in a dozen other states, among them the court’s own 1986 decision in Bowers v. Hardwick, in which justices had ruled 5-4 that nothing in the Constitution prevented states from criminalizing consensual sex between gay men, even in their own homes.
That changed with the Lawrence decision, in which Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, writing for five justices, opined: “The petitioners are entitled to respect for their private lives.”
“The state,” he wrote in the 6-3 Lawrence opinion, “cannot demean their existence or control their destiny by making their private sexual conduct a crime.” Kennedy was appointed to the Supreme Court in 1988 by President Ronald Reagan.
On September 17, 1998, Harris County, Texas police responded to a false report of a “weapons disturbance” at Lawrence’s apartment. The deputy entered the unlocked apartment on the outskirts of Houston and said he witnessed Lawrence and Tyron Garner having sex. The two men were arrested for violating a Texas law that prohibited “deviate sexual intercourse with another individual of the same sex.” Lawrence and Garner were held overnight by police, and charged with violating Texas’s anti-sodomy “Homosexual Conduct” law. State courts rejected their constitutional challenges to the Texas law, relying on the earlier Supreme Court ruling in Bowers.
Mitchell Katine, a Houston lawyer who represented Lawrence, told the New York Times that his client “was upset about how he was treated, physically and personally, that night,” adding that, “when he was vindicated in the Supreme Court, he felt he got justice.”
Lawrence died at his Houston home. His death came to light when Katine, his lawyer in the case, tried to located Lawrence with an invitation to an event commemorating the landmark ruling.
