Biography
William Sanger was an American architect and painter, and the husband of the birth-control campaigner Margaret Sanger. In January 1915, while Margaret was in England avoiding her own federal obscenity prosecution, an agent of Anthony Comstock’s New York Society for the Suppression of Vice called at Sanger’s studio posing as a sympathizer and asked for a copy of Family Limitation, the contraception pamphlet she had written. Sanger gave him one and was arrested for it, charged under section 1142 of the New York Penal Code with distributing contraceptive information — the same statute under which Margaret would be convicted two years later. Tried before the Court of Special Sessions in New York on September 10, 1915, he was convicted and offered the choice of a $150 fine or thirty days in jail. He refused to pay, saying he would not buy his way out of a law he considered unjust, and served the full thirty days, from September 10 to October 10, 1915. Comstock died on September 21, eleven days into the sentence. The prosecution — a man jailed for handing a pamphlet to a decoy agent — drew wide attention to the birth-control campaign and to the use of entrapment against it.
