NEWPORT NEWS, Virginia– A woman charged under the state’s felony crimes against nature law has pleaded guilty to a lesser charge of indecent exposure.
Keia Horton, 22, had initially planned to challenge the constitutionality of the law, which prohibits certain types of sex between consenting adults. She said she decided to plead to the lesser charge to avoid the possibility of a felony conviction.
“I didn’t want to go through with it,” Horton said after the brief hearing in Newport News Circuit Court. “I didn’t want to go to jail.”
Horton was charged on Jan. 29 by a police officer who found her in a parked car on Constance Drive receiving oral sex from a man. She and 29-year-old Kenneth Lars were both charged with a felony under the statute for crimes against nature. The statute says people can’t have oral or anal sex, whether homosexual or heterosexual, but the law doesn’t specify whether the sex is illegal in public or in private.
Lars pleaded guilty to indecent exposure at a preliminary hearing in March. But Horton, who was offered a plea agreement at that time, wanted to fight the law. Her lawyer, David Lee, planned to argue that the charge is unconstitutional because the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in a Texas case that states can’t pass laws that restrict the private sex lives of consenting adults.
At the time of the arrests, the director of the ACLU of Virginia said he was surprised by the charges because of other misdemeanor laws against public acts of sex.
Thursday, Horton accepted an agreement with prosecutors and pleaded guilty to indecent exposure, a misdemeanor charge that carries a maximum sentence of a year in jail and a $2,500 fine. The felony charge carries a maximum of five years in prison.
“I came prepared to listen to this constitutional argument,” Circuit Judge David F. Pugh said. “I even read the (Texas) case.”
Pugh convicted Horton and gave her a 90-day jail sentence, but suspended all the time pending her good behavior for a year.
Horton, a former Navy seaman who now works as a sales representative for a phone company, said she “learned my lesson.”
“Take it in the house next time,” she offered as advice to others. “They can’t come up to your window with a flashlight.”