In 2017, Baltimore County Police responded to a home on Eastern Avenue past North Point Boulevard, where they had been summoned in the previous few months almost half a dozen times.

Patricia Bogdan told officers she had been experiencing problems with her husband, so she met a man on Instagram. They started having an affair.

Police charged her with adultery.

“I thought it was like a joke,” said Bogdan, 43, of Dundalk, in a recent interview. “I was shocked.”

Maryland is one of more than a dozen states where adultery is still a crime. It’s a misdemeanor punishable by a $10 fine.

Since 2015, at least eight people have been charged with the offense, according to data from the Maryland Judiciary. None of those cases appears to have resulted in a conviction.

Most of the prosecutions started when people went to the district court commissioner, a judicial officer whose responsibilities include reviewing applications for statement of charges for probable cause.

When he was a student at the University of Baltimore School of Law, Brian Murphy worked as a district court commissioner in 1978 and 1979 in Ocean City.

One night, Murphy recalled, a man phoned the office because he wanted to press charges after learning that his wife had been unfaithful.

So Murphy said he conducted legal research. Sure enough, he realized, adultery was a crime. “What do I do?” Murphy recalled thinking. “How do I get out of this one?”

The man never showed up.

“Thank the Lord,” said Murphy, who’s now a defense attorney in Baltimore.

But law enforcement pursued the charge in at least two cases.

Baltimore County Police reported that they charged Bogdan in the hopes of pushing her to “settle the disputes and prevent further incident.” Officers wrote in court documents that she thanked them for issuing the citation, a characterization she disputes.

The Baltimore County State’s Attorney’s Office later agreed to put the case on the shelf.

Efforts to change the law in Maryland

Adultery is no longer a ground for divorce in Maryland as of Oct. 1, 2023, said Margaret Johnson, a professor of law and associate dean for faculty research and development at the University of Baltimore School of Law.

But Johnson said adultery can come up in divorce cases in two ways: the equitable distribution of marital property and alimony, or spousal support. Judges must consider several factors, she said, including the circumstances that led to the estrangement of the parties.

Johnson said there has been a trend of states allowing people to leave marriages without having to point the finger at their spouse.

The original statute that criminalized adultery in Maryland, she said, appears to date to 1715.

The law specified that the fine for adultery was three pounds of money or 1,200 pounds of tobacco. If people could not pay the fine, they would be whipped.

Lawmakers in 2018 tried to repeal the act.

Family law attorneys testified before the House Judiciary Committee that people assert their Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination in divorce cases as an obstruction tactic.

“Truly, this is simply arcane,” said Del. Kathleen Dumais, a Democrat from Montgomery County, who sponsored the legislation. “There need not be a crime on the books and certainly not a misdemeanor with a $10 fine.”

Dumais is now a judge in Montgomery County.

The bill passed 87-49 in the Maryland House of Delegates but stalled in the Senate.

New York repealed its adultery law in 2024

Some states, including New York, have done away with laws that make adultery a crime.

New York Assemblymember Charles Lavine, a Democrat from North Shore and chair of the Judiciary Committee, led the effort to repeal adultery, which was a misdemeanor that carried up to three months in jail and a $500 fine.

He said one of his former colleagues, Dan Quart, initially sponsored the bill. Lavine said his legislative team members came across the proposal, which got their attention.

So Lavine said he took up the bill and conducted additional research.

Adultery became a crime in New York in 1907, when a lot of puritans held political power, Lavine said. At the time, there were a lot of editorials and letters to the editor in newspapers opposed to the law, he said.

A United Nations working group issued a statement in 2012, he noted, that urged governments to repeal laws that criminalize adultery.

Experts found, even when these measures are equally applied, women will continue to face extreme vulnerabilities and a violation of their human rights.

Lavine said it troubles him when laws embody hypocrisy or “do nothing more than impose one person’s parochial and narrow view of morality on the rest of us.”

“Even though not that many people were actually charged with this, the purpose of law is to protect community,” Lavine said. “And this is a law that not only did not protect community but served as a way for some people to impose personal vengeance on other people.”

Lavine asked state Sen. Liz Krueger, a Democrat from Manhattan, to carry the bill in the New York State Senate.

Krueger said she had been aware that adultery was a crime. Though she said she personally does not think cheating is OK, the law was bad public policy.

District attorneys, she said, have a lot of discretion.

“Hypothetically, some strange judge in some strange county of New York could sentence you to prison time for adultery,” Krueger said. “Who in their right mind would think that is a smart idea in the 21st century?”

Laws remain on the books until legislators move to repeal them, Krueger said. And decisions made at one point in history might be very different than decisions made at a later time.

Democracy, she said, is supposed to be a responsive model of government.

Lawmakers in 2024 overwhelmingly passed the legislation. And New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, signed the bill into law.