Adultery: Encyclopedia II - Adultery - Penalties for adultery

Adultery - Penalties for adultery

Historically adultery has been subject to severe sanctions including the death penalty and has been grounds for divorce under fault-based divorce laws. In some places the method for punishing adultery was traditionally stoning to death. Wives have usually been more harshly punished that husbands, however this arises from biological necessity - a cheating wife could lead to a husband providing for a child who was not any blood relation of his, whereas a cheating husband would at least not lead to the wife providing for a "cuckoo's child". However the wife's boyfriend would usually suffer the most, particularly if he was of lower social class than the husband - in ancient India if a man had sex with his guru's wife, his penis would be amputated and then he would be roasted alive. In many parts of the world, including Texas up to 1972, if a man found another man having sex with his wife he could legally kill him and incur no penalty.

In the original Napoleonic Code, a man could ask to be divorced from his wife if she committed adultery, but the adultery of the husband was not a sufficient motive unless he had kept his concubine in the family home.

In many jurisdictions (e.g, Austria, Korea, Switzerland, Taiwan), adultery is still illegal, but enforcement of the laws is often uneven. In places where adultery laws are actually enforced, wives are often punished more harshly than husbands, in some cases being considered guilty of adultery even when they have been raped. This has been alleged to happen in Nigeria [1] and Pakistan [2] (see Honor killings" in "Best Practices").

In the United States, laws vary from state to state. For example, in Pennsylvania, adultery is technically punishable by 2 years of imprisonment or 18 months of treatment for insanity (for history, see Hamowy). That being said, such statutes are typically considered blue laws, and are rarely, if ever, enforced. In the U.S. Military, adultery is a court-martialable offense only if it was "to the prejudice of good order and discipline" or "of a nature to bring discredit upon the armed forces" [3]. This has been applied to cases where both partners were members of the military (and particularly where one is in command of the other), or one partner and the other's spouse.

In Canadian law, adultery is defined under the Divorce Act. Though the written definition sets it as extramarital relations with someone of the opposite sex, the recent change in the definition of marriage gave grounds for a British Columbia judge to strike that definition down. In a 2005 case of a woman filing for divorce, her husband had cheated on her with another man, which the judge felt was equal reasoning to dissolve the union.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Penalties for adultery", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki