Roger David Nance
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Roger David Nance, resident of Houston, Texas, inadvertently set in motion the wheels of the court case Lawrence v. Texas in which sodomy laws in the United States were ruled unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court. He did this by filing a false police report, allegedly to harass his homosexual co-worker.
On September 17, 1998, Nance, then 41 years old, reported a "weapons disturbance" to police, saying that there was a man with a gun "going crazy" at his apartment complex. When Harris County Sheriff's Department deputies arrived to investigate, Nance directed them to the apartment of John Geddes Lawrence. The officer burst through the door found no person "going crazy" nor did he find a gun. However, he did directly observe Lawrence and Tyron Garner engaged in anal sex. Lawrence and Garner were arrested, held overnight in jail, and charged with violating Texas' anti-sodomy statute. They pled no contest and were fined. Then, Lawrence and Garner sued the state on the grounds that the state statute was unconstitutional. The case made its way to the U.S. Supreme Court, and several years after the incident, sodomy laws throughout the nation were deemed unconstitutional.
Nance pled no contest to charges of filing a false police report and served 15 days in jail. According to David Jones, one of Lawrence and Garner's attorneys, Nance was motivated by a "personality conflict between [himself] and the people in the [neighboring] apartment."
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