'Absurd," the Utah Supreme Court called it.

Authorities in Weber County pursued a 13-year-old girl after she had sexual relations with a 12-year-old boy and became pregnant. Under pressure from heavy-handed prosecutors, she pleaded guilty in juvenile court to sexually abusing the boy -- the adult equivalent of a second-degree felony. She vowed to appeal. The boy pleaded guilty without an appeal.

Absurd is right, and the court properly tossed the conviction. The poor kid has the weight of the world on her shoulders already, as her attorney said, without facing what amounts to a felony.

The question is, Where are we getting prosecutors who don't have the sense that God gave a pencil eraserfi

This is certainly not the first overzealous prosecution in recent Utah history. It's almost getting to be a trademark of our state.

Polygamist Tom Green, who is about to be released after six years in prison, was a victim of overzealous Juab County prosecutor David Leavitt, who saw Green flaunting his novel family configuration -- five wives in separate households and upward of 25 children -- on national television and decided that he had to make an example of him.

Green was convicted of 2001 of child rape for having sex with his first wife, Linda, whom he married when she was 13 and he was 37. We agree that in today's culture that's a bad thing. However, elapsed time and the current condition of the alleged "victim" should be taken into consideration in determining the reasonableness of a prosecution.

The charges brought in 2001 might have made sense if Linda had seen herself as a victim and had tried to escape his clutches over the years. But that's not the case. As an adult with the ability to do as she chooses, she chooses to stay with her husband.

They've been married for more than two decades, and Linda continues to proclaim her love. She has been Green's most vigorous defender, refusing to testify against him in court and pleading tearfully with the Utah Board of Pardons and Parole on Tuesday to let him return to his family.

What Leavitt did to Green -- while bragging about his 96 percent conviction rate -- was simply wrong. Adding insult to injury, he nailed Green for bigamy even though Green never claimed to be legally married to anyone but his first wife.

There is something rotten in Denmark -- and in Utah -- when a man can be singled out for criminal prosecution for shacking up with multiple women. This is done all the time with absolute impunity, even though it's on Utah's books as a Class B misdemeanor.

Same goes for fornication, defined in the Utah Code as sex between two unmarried individuals and, like adultery, as a Class B misdemeanor.

We don't advocate fornication, mind you, but we do think it is something that needs to be countered through moral persuasion, not prosecution. The fact is that young people are fornicating all the time without legal consequences, yet this derelict little law remains in the Utah Code making consensual dalliances a crime.

Every so often, a prosecutor will decide to latch onto some law that shouldn't exist anymore and go after somebody even though thousands of other people are doing the same deed. It's time that stopped. If the behavior of a significant segment of society is technically illegal but rarely prosecuted -- like fornication, adultery and polygamy -- the law should become null.

Since 2003, when the U.S. Supreme Court, in Lawrence v. Texas, recognized a virtually impermeable privacy shield for individual sexual behavior, states have been dumping their antiquated adultery and fornication laws. It's time Utah did the same.

While it's at it, the Legislature should provide some penalties for absurd prosecutions.

This story appeared in The Daily Herald on page A6.