New York Gov. Kathy Hochul signed legislation repealing a near 120-year-old law that prohibited adultery.

The 1907 law said that “a person is guilty of adultery when he engages in sexual intercourse with another person at a time when he has a living spouse, or the other person has a living spouse.”

Adultery (cheating on your spouse) is no longer considered a crime in New York 👀 pic.twitter.com/s6lAuzgmAK

— FearBuck (@FearedBuck) November 25, 2024

It was considered a Class B misdemeanor and carried a jail sentence of up to 90 days.

According to Gothamist, Hochul said “these matters should clearly be handled by these individuals and not our criminal justice system.”

“Let’s take this silly, outdated statute off the books, once and for all,” she added.

Cheating on your spouse is no longer a crime in New York, with the repeal of a little-known 1907 law https://t.co/JRWPhU838u

— The Associated Press (@AP) November 23, 2024

Gothamist reports:

New York had been one of 17 states that considered adultery a crime, at least on paper. It now becomes at least the fifth state to have repealed such a law since 2015.

Technically, the New York law applied when a person “engage(d) in sexual intercourse with another person at a time when he has a living spouse, or the other person has a living spouse.”

But authorities had enforced it infrequently, with only 10 people statewide facing adultery as their highest-level charge in a given case since 1979, according to the state Division of Criminal Justice.

The last known case was in 2010, when local police charged a 41-year-old married woman after she was caught in a sex act with a man in a public park in the city of Batavia, between Rochester and Buffalo. The adultery charge was later dropped.

State Sen. Liz Krueger of Manhattan and Assemblymember Charles Lavine of Long Island, both Democrats, sponsored the bill to repeal the adultery law. State lawmakers passed it earlier this year.

Cheating on your spouse is no longer a crime in New York. https://t.co/LW9fvsyeHG

— Bloomberg (@business) November 22, 2024

From the Associated Press:

State Assemblymember Charles Lavine, sponsor of the bill, said about a dozen people have been charged under the law since the 1970s, and just five of those cases resulted in convictions.

“Laws are meant to protect our community and to serve as a deterrent to anti-social behavior. New York’s adultery law advanced neither purpose,” Lavine said in a statement Friday.

The state’s law appears to have last been used in 2010, against a woman who was caught engaging in a sex act in a park, but the adultery charge was later dropped as part of a plea deal.

New York came close to repealing the law in the 1960s after a state commission tasked with evaluating the penal code said it was nearly impossible to enforce.

At the time, lawmakers were initially on board with removing the ban but eventually decided to keep it after a politician argued that repealing it would make it seem like the state was officially endorsing infidelity, according to a New York Times article from 1965.