The People v. Ronald Onofre, 51 N.Y.2d 476, 415 N.E.2d 936, 434 N.Y.S.2d 947 (1980), was an appeal against New York's sodomy laws, decided in the New York Court of Appeals.
The appeal consisted of several cases consolidated into one. The appellants were challenging the constitutionality of a 1965 law, New York Penal Law § 130.38, which made it a misdemeanor to engage in "deviate sexual intercourse" (defined to include anal and oral but not vaginal sex) with another person.
Appellants
Ronald Onofre was convicted for violating New York Penal Law that made it a misdemeanor to engage in sodomy (encompassing anal and oral sex, not vaginal), when he was caught having sex with his 17-year-old male lover in his home. Conde Peoples III and Philip Goss were convicted for engaging in oral sex in an automobile parked in downtown Buffalo. Mary Sweat was convicted for having oral sex with a man in a parked truck, also in Buffalo. All these defendants appealed their convictions and argued that the consensual sodomy statute was unconstitutional.
Influences from other cases
The Court ruled that on the basis of Griswold v. Connecticut, 381 U.S. 479 (1965) and Stanley v. Georgia, the above sexual actions, when consensual, should fall under the right to privacy alluded to in the US Constitution. Specifically, the Court opined:
<blockquote>The People are in no disagreement that a fundamental right of personal decision exists; the divergence of the parties focuses on what subjects fall within its protection, the People contending that it extends to only two aspects of sexual behavior - marital intimacy (by virtue of the Supreme Court's decision in Griswold) and procreative choice (by reason of Eisenstadt and Roe v. Wade). . The Onofre Court stated,
<blockquote>In light of these decisions, protecting under the cloak of the right of privacy individual decisions as to indulgence in acts of sexual intimacy by unmarried persons and as to satisfaction of sexual desires by resort to material condemned as obscene by community standards when done in a cloistered setting, no rational basis appears for excluding from the same protection decisions - such as those made by the defendants before us - to seek sexual gratification from what at least once was commonly regarded as "deviant" conduct, so long as the decisions are voluntarily made by adults in a noncommercial, private setting.
Judge Domenick L. Gabrielli and Chief Judge Cooke dissented. In their opinion, the analysis utilized by the majority meant that "all private, consensual conduct would necessarily involve the exercise of a constitutionally protected "fundamental right" unless the conduct in question jeopardize the physical health of the participant."