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A panel of federal judges struck down Virginia’s anti-sodomy law yesterday, a decade after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled such regulations unconstitutional. In their ruling, the judges from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit in Richmond held that the anti-sodomy law did not hold up to the 2003 Supreme Court ruling that banned laws prohibiting sex between consenting adults.

Yesterday’s ruling, however, originated from a 2005 case in which a 47-year-old man was convicted of soliciting a 17-year-old girl for sodomy, The Times-Dispatch reports:

The ruling stemmed from the 2005 conviction of William Scott MacDonald, then 47, for contributing to the delinquency of a minor and for the criminal solicitation of a 17-year-old girl to commit sodomy.

The girl refused and reported the incident to police after MacDonald claimed she had sexually assaulted him. The predicate felony for the criminal solicitation charge was Virginia’s Crimes Against Nature law, a provision of which criminalizes sodomy.

MacDonald appealed his conviction multiple times to the Virginia Court of Appeals, which refused him. He then appealed through the federal system, and was joined by the American Civil Liberties Union.

The ruling yesterday does not upend laws involving consenting sex between adults and minors in Virginia, where the age of consent is 18. But it does hold that the anti-sodomy law should not have served as the basis of the other charges against MacDonald.