Court Opinion

ID: 9462951
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-04 22:54:10.594197+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:37:51.296319
License: Public Domain

CRAVEN, Circuit Judge
(dissenting):
I dissent because I think it is dangerous to withdraw from any citizen the protection of the Constitution because he or she is amoral, immoral or just plain nasty. The point I make is a factual one. It will not be understood without knowing what the case is about, and to make that clear I begin by stating what it is not about. It is not about group sex. It is not about sexual activity, deviant or otherwise, in public. The Lovisis attack their charges and convictions under a statute making their conduct with each other while married criminal — whether or not in public and without regard to the presence or participation of a third person.
*356Most of the court’s opinion consists of a narrative of the sort found in “adult” bookstores. Had the case been properly tried in the Virginia state court, we would not even know this sordid story because Dunn’s participation is irrelevant and highly prejudicial to the question of the Lovisis’ guilt of a violation of Virginia’s crime against nature by their conduct with each other. Just as a jury cannot forget such evidence erroneously received, neither, apparently, can we.
The great freedoms enumerated in the first ten amendments are known to all Americans by name, e. g., speech, press, religion, etc. What may be the greatest of all, antedating the Constitution as well as the Bill of Rights, has not yet been christened. “Liberty” is too much.
The “right of privacy,” apt in some cases, is a misleading misnomer in others including this one. This freedom may be termed more accurately “the right to be let alone,”1 or personal autonomy, or simply “personhood.”2 One thing for sure — it is not limited to the conduct of persons in private. Marriage, normally a public ceremony, is protected.3 Mrs. Roe4 does not lose her right to be let alone to abort because her doctor permits the intrusion of a nurse to assist him. Baird5 may not be prosecuted for failure to be discreet and secret in lecturing students on contraception.
It is therefore unclear to me why the Lovisis forfeit their right to be let alone in their conjugal relationship because they allowed a third person to be present. The only valid reason I can think of is a moral value judgment that deviant sex is so odious 6 that not even the Constitution may be successfully interposed to protect a husband and wife so despicably disposed. However right the court may be as to morals, I do not believe it to be a proper principle of constitutional law.
If there is any more fundamental right of personhood than the conjugal relationship of husband and wife, it does not occur to me. I do not believe it to be within the power of the state to make consensual physical contact between husband and wife criminal;7 and when convictions are predicated upon that fact alone, the writ must issue.
In order to deny the Lovisis their constitutional right to be let alone in their conduct with each other, the court has amended the indictment in the state court so as to *357charge the Lovisis with lewd and lascivious behavior in the presence of another and indecent exposure. I agree that they are guilty of both offenses, but I believe this court has not the power to validate convictions of offenses not charged.
I would hold that the Lovisis are protected by the right to be let alone from a conviction of violating the Virginia crime against nature statute with each other, and I would reverse and remand with instructions to issue the writ.
Judge Winter and Judge Butzner authorize me to say that they join in these views.

. Mr. Justice Brandéis coined this phrase in the course of dissenting in Olmstead v. United States, 277 U.S. 438, 478, 48 S.Ct. 564, 572, 72 L.Ed. 944 (1928):
The makers of our Constitution undertook to secure conditions favorable to the pursuit of happiness. They recognized the significance of man’s spiritual nature, of his feelings and of his intellect. They knew that only a part of the pain, pleasure and satisfaction of life are to be found in material things. They sought to protect Americans in their beliefs, their thoughts, their emotions and their sensations. They conferred, as against the Government, the right to be let alone — the most comprehensive of rights and the right most valued by civilized men. . . .

. In his dinner address to the American Law Institute on May 23, 1975, Professor Freund said:
The theme of personhood is . . emerging. It has been groping, I think, for a rubric. Sometimes it is called privacy, inaptly it would seem to me; autonomy perhaps, though that seems too dangerously broad. • But the idea is that of personhood in the sense of those attributes of an individual which are irreducible in his selfhood. We all know the agonizing judgments that have had to be made and that will have to be made in such diverse areas as abortion and the death penalty, which it seems to me are aspects of this issue of personhood.

. Loving v. Virginia, 388 U.S. 1, 87 S.Ct. 1817, 18 L.Ed.2d 1010 (1967).

. Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113, 93 S.Ct. 705, 35 L.Ed.2d 147 (1973). See also Doe v. Bolton, 410 U.S. 179, 93 S.Ct. 739, 35 L.Ed.2d 201 (1973).

. Eisenstadt v. Baird, 405 U.S. 438, 92 S.Ct. 1029, 31 L.Ed.2d 349 (1972).

. Dunn’s participation makes it even more odious — but that is another case. I reiterate these cases relate only to the Lovisis’ conduct with each other.

. Again, it is irrelevant to the Lovisis’ guilt under this statute that a third person was present; the statute is violated whether or not anyone else is present.