Bigamy is a crime, though many prosecutors aren’t
very fond of pursuing these cases.  The
offender may have married multiple wives at the same time but, the objectors
say, who cares?  Their position is to
compare it to offenses such as adultery, or any sex between consenting
adults. 

I once charged a case of bigamy as a reviewing
prosecutor and the case went into the system.  The clerk’s office blindly assigned it, the standard practice, to a
particular judge.  That judge’s assigned
trial prosecutor got the case and went, shall we say, bonkers. 

“WHAT?! HE ACTUALLY CHARGED THIS??”

Because the judge expressed the same disinterest in
it, the trial prosecutor figured he had a leg up and came red-faced into my
office.  Have you ever seen those
“invisible dog” leashes?  It’s a stiff
leash with a dog collar attached at the end but no dog.  He had attached the case file at the end of
this leash with some tape. 

“Here’s this dog of a case,” he asserted.  “You charged it; you can try it.” 

Since my position in the office was superior to his,
he lost the argument.  The judge ended up
putting the bigamist on probation with a condition that he choose one and
divorce the other.  The case inspired me
to pen a verse, a portion of which appears below:

DIVORCE  vs.  BIGAMY

Two cases filed the same day / Were labeled
differently; / The civil one was a divorce, / The criminal: bigamy.

The cases dealt with marriages / To Lisa, Jan and
Jennie, / The husbands’ common problem was / They each had one too many.

To wed, divorce, then wed again, / Is not considered
heinous, / But marriages are criminal / Whenever simultaneous.