Incest: Sex Offense or Dumb Law?
By Caryn J. Adams, Attorney at Law
The Gasper Law Group
When I was in junior high school, my dad bought me a book of absurd laws that I absolutely loved and read cover to cover multiple times. I still love absurd laws. For example, did you know that detonating a nuclear device anywhere in the city of Chino, California is punishable by a $500 fine? Or that it is illegal to drive around the town square in Oxford, Mississippi, more than 100 times on a single occasion?
There are plenty of great websites for absurd laws. “Dumb Laws,” http://www.dumblaws.com/ , is a voluminous repository of the inane. The Young Turks have compiled a list of the 10 most absurd laws from around the world (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJda5OJep_8). My favorite find is the story of Luke Bateman and Richard Smith, two British college students who in 2005 decided to spend their summer road-tripping across the United States and breaking as many absurd laws along the way as they could. http://blog.seattlepi.nwsource.com/buzz/archives/004397.html. No word on whether or not they actually did hire a boat and attempt to go whale hunting in Utah, but I wouldn’t expect them to confess to a felony anyway.
Of course, absurd laws aren’t so funny when they’re used to unfairly prosecute a client. In Colorado, incest is a class four felony punishable at the maximum by an indeterminate life sentence in prison. If the “child” involved is under the age of twenty-one, then the incest is considered “aggravated,” making it a class three felony. Now, I know that doesn’t sound so bad, and some of you are thinking, “Sure, any parent who commits incest should be locked up for a long time.” The problem is that “incest” includes natural children, adopted children, and step-children.
