interrogation. Sodomy was a crime under Florida law at that time and remained so until the United States Supreme Court's Lawrence v. Texas ruling in 2003. Admission of homosexuality constituted moral turpitude and was grounds for firing or expulsion from college. However, the Johns Committee had already begun interrogating suspected homosexuals among students and faculty on Florida campuses before the Legislature gave specific authorization for it. In 1958, committee chairman Johns illegally sent a covert investigator to the University of Florida after his son, Jerome Johns, told his father that "effeminate instructors had perverted the curriculum." Other students identified professors as homosexuals for such flimsy reasons as observing them eating lunch together or wearing Bermuda shorts on campus. Investigator Strickland hired student informants with FLIC funds, used highway patrolmen to remove professors from the classroom, and telephoned some instructors late at night, demanding that they provide testimony in Strickland's motel room at his convenience. He also prohibited the accused from confronting their complainants, seldom informed subjects of their legal or constitutional rights, and rarely offered them sufficient time to secure an attorney or prepare a defense. Students, too, faced the committee's wrath. While faculty and staff suffered immediate dismissal if suspected of homosexuality, gay students could remain on campus only if they visited the infirmary and submitted to psychiatric treatments throughout their academic career.… The FLIC compelled personnel at the UF medical center to disclose information found in patient records and…also reserved the right to seize clinical records as it did when investigators seized paperwork on thirty-five female students who had given birth out of wedlock at the UF facility. One victim, University of Florida honors graduate Art Coppleston, described the experience of interrogation this way: I arrived at the University of Florida on my 25th birthday in September 1957. Having completed four years in the Air Force, I was anxious to move ahead quickly with my education, and get on to a working career. …I was called in to be interrogated three or four times during the next two years. Each time, it was the same setting, and the same set of questions. Each time I was unceremoniously marched out of class, in front of the instructor and all my classmates, by a uniformed policeman. Once this occurred during a final exam in accounting. …At each interrogation, I refused to tell them anything. Each time I was amazed that,