Williamson, 316 U.S. 535 (1942), is a unanimous United States Supreme Court ruling[1] that held that laws permitting the compulsory sterilization of criminals are unconstitutional as it violates a person's rights given under the 14th Amendment of the United States Constitution, specifically the Equal Protection Clause and the Due Process Clause.

[2][3][4] The relevant Oklahoma law applied to "habitual criminals" but excluded white-collar crimes from carrying sterilization penalties.

In 1935, the Supreme Court of Oklahoma ruled in favor of the Habitual Criminal Sterilization Act, which allowed the state to impose a sentence of compulsory sterilization as part of their judgment against individuals who had been convicted three or more times of crimes "amounting to felonies involving moral turpitude.

[4] Most punitive sterilization laws, including the Oklahoma statute, prescribed vasectomy for males and salpingectomy for females as the method of rendering the individual infertile.

We have not the slightest basis for inferring that line has any significance in eugenics, nor that the inheritability of criminal traits follows the neat legal distinctions which the law has marked between those two offenses.

In evil or reckless hands it can cause races or types which are inimical to the dominant group to wither and disappear.

His main argument was that for legislation to convict and sterilize the defendant, there needed to be proof that criminal behavior could be inherited genetically, which the court had none at the time.

He cited Buck v. Bell and said that because it has been proven that feeblemindedness is inheritable, sterilization was acceptable, but in the case of Skinner v. Oklahoma, it was not.

Punitive sterilizations made up only negligible amounts of the total operations performed, as most states and prison officials were nervous about their legal status, which was not affirmed in Buck v. Bell specifically, as possible violations of the Eighth ("cruel and unusual punishment") or Fourteenth Amendments ("Due Process" and "Equal Protection Clauses").

[citation needed] In 2002, the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit held that an inmate, incarcerated by the California Department of Corrections and serving a life sentence, was not permitted to inseminate his wife artificially because "the right to procreate is fundamentally inconsistent with incarceration."