Adultery is no longer a crime in New York.
Gov. Kathy Hochul signed a bill on Friday repealing a 117-year-old state law that criminalized adultery, which had been a class B misdemeanor punishable by up to 90 days in jail.
In a statement, the governor said it was “somewhat ironic” that she signed the bill, given her 40-year marriage to her husband. But she said she understood people “often have complex relationships.”
“These matters should clearly be handled by these individuals and not our criminal justice system,” Hochul said. “Let’s take this silly, outdated statute off the books, once and for all.”
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 It now becomes at least the fifth state to have repealed such a law since 2015.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.
The new law, which repeals the old law, took effect immediately on Friday.
