Move-In Ready: Gov. Scott OKs Bill to Let Couples Shack Up

Gov. Rick Scott on Wednesday signed a bill to repeal the state's largely unenforced prohibition on cohabitation. It was one of 20 bills he signed into law.

Under a law that has been on the books since 1868, a man and woman living together could be fined $500 and locked up in jail for 60 days. According to 2014 census data, there are nearly 438,000 unmarried male-female couples among 7.3 million Florida households.

The new law repeals the entire statute covering married or unmarried men and women "engaging in open behavior that is gross lewdness and lascivious.''

Florida is one of only a handful of states that still has a law making cohabitation illegal.

But obviously the state didn't care enough. Otherwise they'd be arresting couples living together.

But according to this, co-habitation laws have been used to punish people civilly:

http://www.myfloridahouse.gov/Sections/Documents/loaddoc.aspx?FileName=h4003z.CRJS.DOCX&DocumentType=Analysis&BillNumber=4003&Session=2016

While rarely used in the criminal context, cohabitation laws have been used as a rationale to sanction people in a civil context. For example, in 1979, the Florida Department of Business and Professional Regulation suspended a company’s liquor license after finding that six of the company’s agents, servants or employees violated s. 798.02, F.S.5 In 1999, North Carolina officials refused to grant victim’s compensation to an unmarried victim of domestic violence because she was cohabiting with her boyfriend, and was therefore a criminal. 6 In 2001, authorities in Virginia cited that state’s cohabitation law to revoke a professional license of the owner of a day care center.7

As I understand it was typically not used or enforced alone but in combination with other offences or civil violations - sort of a piling on of “additional charges” that may and probably had nothing to do with the main offense or violation.

During a committee hearing on the measure earlier this year Bradenton Republican Senator bill Galvano said the rule could be used unfairly.

“Unfortunately because it’s on the books and not being enforced it still have the potential of being used as a segue to search of a premises. And that’s a concern because then you can always identify it as an underlying criminal activity to get a warrant to go in for maybe other purposes that you could not achieve that same warrant status on,” Galvano says.

Keep in mind that Florida also has a high number of seniors, some of them widowed who sometimes co-habitat for financial reasons along with for the companionship.

FWIW my mother’s widowed and very religious Catholic aunt had an unmarried gentlemen living with her for many years (1950’s through early 60’s). He had his own room and was sort of a border / handyman but while most people didn’t think of them as “shacking up”, and it was likely completely platonic in the physical sense, they had a very close relationship and “Uncle Quaid” as the family came to refer to him as, was a part of the family much as if he and my mother’s aunt had been a married couple. I do recall my mother telling me that some busy bodies at her parish gossiped about it and made complaints to the parish priest about the immorality of their “arrangement” as an excuse to get her off one of their charitable committees. Their complaints were ignored and they were told to mind their own business and look to cleaning their own houses first.

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