New York might bar prosecutors from using condoms as evidence:
New York City spends more than a million dollars every year to distribute free condoms to combat unintended pregnancies and diseases such as AIDS. Yet police are allowed to confiscate those very condoms as evidence of prostitution. That conflict is behind the latest legislative proposal to make New York the first state to prohibit condoms — specifically the existence of multiple condoms — from being used as evidence in prostitution cases, a widespread practice that advocates say undermines decades of public health goals.
Elizabeth Nolan Brown supports the proposal:
In a 2012 report from the Sex Workers Project at the Urban Justice Center (UJC) and The PROS Network, half of sex workers surveyed said they sometimes didn’t carry condoms for fear of law enforcement repercussions or had unprotected sex after police had confiscated condoms. “It’s not a myth,” Sienna Baskin, co-director of the Sex Workers Project at the UJC, told The Village Voice last year. “The practice of using condoms as evidence is very prevalent in New York.”
But this isn’t a police practice limited to New York. Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, and Pittsburgh are just a few cities where condoms can still be used as evidence. San Francisco only recently ended the practice. Carrying condoms is still criminalized in all of Louisiana and North Carolina.
These practices put us in line with anti-prostitution efforts in places like Kenya, Namibia, Russia, South Africa, and Zimbabwe—and out of line with established American privacy rights.
The Dish 