Consensual Sex With Girl, 13, Ruled Rape

A man who argued that a 13-year-old girl had consented to have sex with him lost his bid Friday to have his statutory rape conviction overturned.

He and the girl are now married and have a child.

The Kentucky Court of Appeals rejected Jason Lee Griffith’s claim that the state’s rape law is unconstitutional because it assumes those under age 16 and unmarried cannot consent to sex.

It is legal to have sex with somebody that young if those involved are married.

Griffith was 22 and Chastity Lunsford was 13 when she got pregnant in 1992. Their son was born that December.

The couple got married a month later, with the consent of the girl’s mother, while Griffith’s case was pending in Kenton Circuit Court. Griffith pleaded guilty to second-degree rape in March, 1993, and was sentenced to five years in prison.

In his appeal, Griffith claimed that it was unconstitutional to make sex between adults and minors legal if they are married but a criminal act if they are not married.

He said that the state’s “only reason . . . for treating married and unmarried persons differently . . . is that, under Judeo-Christian theology, only persons married to one another are permitted to have sex.”

Writing for the court, Judge John Gardner said that the law had a “purely secular purpose”--to protect minors from sexual exploitation.

By requiring a parent’s consent for marriage, “the state has already taken steps to protect” married minors, Gardner said.

Griffith’s attorney previously vowed to appeal to the state Supreme Court if they lost at the appeals court level.