Background
Under Oklahoma's Habitual Criminal Sterilization Act of 1935, the state could impose a sentence of compulsory sterilization as part of their judgment against individuals who had been convicted two or more times of crimes "amounting to felonies involving moral turpitude". The defendant, Jack T. Skinner, had been convicted once for chicken-stealing and twice for armed robbery.
The motivation behind the law was primarily eugenic: to try to weed out "unfit" individuals from the gene pool. Criminal sterilization laws like the one in Oklahoma were designed to target "criminality," believed by some at the time to possibly be a hereditary trait. Most punitive sterilization laws, including the Oklahoma statute, prescribed vasectomy as the method of rendering the individual infertile (which, unlike castration, does not affect sexual urge or function) in males, and salpingectomy in females (a relatively invasive operation, requiring heavy sedation, and hence with more risks to personal well-being).
In section 195 of the act, it was specifically outlined that "offenses arising out of the violation of the prohibitory laws, revenue acts, embezzlement, or political offenses, shall not come or be considered within the terms of this Act."
Read more about this topic: Skinner V. Oklahoma
Famous quotes containing the word background:
“Pilate with his question “What is truth?” is gladly trotted out these days as an advocate of Christ, so as to arouse the suspicion that everything known and knowable is an illusion and to erect the cross upon that gruesome background of the impossibility of knowledge.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
“They were more than hostile. In the first place, I was a south Georgian and I was looked upon as a fiscal conservative, and the Atlanta newspapers quite erroneously, because they didn’t know anything about me or my background here in Plains, decided that I was also a racial conservative.”
—Jimmy Carter (James Earl Carter, Jr.)
“Silence is the universal refuge, the sequel to all dull discourses and all foolish acts, a balm to our every chagrin, as welcome after satiety as after disappointment; that background which the painter may not daub, be he master or bungler, and which, however awkward a figure we may have made in the foreground, remains ever our inviolable asylum, where no indignity can assail, no personality can disturb us.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)