Cite as 349 Ark. 600 (2002)
their own constitutions that is more protective than the federal right. For example, the Supreme Court of Georgia, which recognizes a "liberty of privacy" guaranteed by a state constitutional provision declaring that no person shall be deprived of liberty except by due process of law, recently held that a sex-neutral statute criminalizing intimate consensual sexual acts performed by adults in private impermissibly infringed upon the right to privacy. Powell v. State, 270 Ga. 327, 510 S.E.2d 18 (1998). Similarly, the Supreme Court of Montana recently held that the explicit right to privacy in Montana's Declaration of Rights protects private, same-gender, consensual, noncommercial sexual conduct. Gryczan v. State, 283 Mont. 433, 942 P.2d 112 (1997). The Tennessee Court of Appeals found that Tennessee's Homosexual Practices Act constituted an unwarranted governmental intrusion into the plaintiff's right to privacy. Campbell v. Sundquist, 926 S.W.2d 250 (Tenn. Ct. App. 1996).
The Supreme Court of Kentucky has also held that Kentucky's criminal statute proscribing consensual homosexual sodomy violated the privacy guarantees of the Kentucky Constitution. Commonwealth v. Wasson, 842 S.W.2d 487 (Ky. 1992). As with our state constitution, no language specifying a "right of privacy" appears in the Kentucky Constitution. Id. However, like Arkansas's, Kentucky's Bill of Rights speaks of all men as "free and equal" with certain "inherent and inalienable rights," including the pursuit of liberty and happiness. Id. Based upon its constitutional language and the state's tradition of recognizing and protecting individual rights, the Kentucky Supreme Court held that the state's sodomy law violated a state right to privacy, saying: "[I]t is not within the competency of government to invade the privacy of a citizen's life and to regulate his conduct in matters in which he alone is concerned, or to prohibit him any liberty the exercise of which will
Nine states and Puerto Rico maintain statutes prohibiting same-sex and opposite-sex sodomy: Alabama - Ala. Code 1975, §§ 13A-6-63 — 65); Florida - Fla. Code. § 800.02 (1993); Idaho - Idaho Code § 18-6605 (Supp. 201); Louisiana - La. Rev. Stat. Ann. § 14:89 (1986); Mississippi - Miss. Code Ann. § 97-29-59 (1972); North Carolina - N.C. Gen. Stat. § 14-177 (1994); Puerto Rico - Penal Code sections 99 and 103 (33 L.P.R.A. §§ 4061 and 4065); South Carolina - S.C. Code Ann. § 16-15-120 (1985); Utah - Utah Code Ann. 5 76-5-403 (1995); Virginia - Va. Code Ann. § 18.2-361 (1994).
