Marriage fraud is no longer a misdemeanor in New York State, a 1907 law repealed.

On Friday, the US state of New York repealed a seldom-enforced law more than a century old that made marriage cheating a misdemeanor and provided for three months in prison for adulterers.

Governor Keti Hočul signed the law repealing that regulation from 1907, which was long considered outdated and difficult to apply.

"While I have been fortunate to share a loving married life with my husband for 40 years - which makes it somewhat ironic that I would sign a bill decriminalizing adultery, I know that relationships between people are often complex," she said, and that "it is clear that this run by individuals, not the criminal justice system. Let's abolish that stupid, outdated regulation forever."

Adultery bans were enacted in several US states to make divorce more difficult at a time when the only way to legally dissolve a marriage was to prove that one spouse had cheated. Charges were rare, and convictions even rarer. Some states have repealed their adultery laws in recent years.

New York law literally stated that adultery is when a person "engages in sexual intercourse with another person while he has a living wife, or when that other person has a living spouse." That law was used for the first time several weeks after it came into effect, the New York Times wrote at the time about the arrest of a married man and a 25-year-old woman.

New York Assemblyman Charles Lavin, a sponsor of the law's repeal, said that since the 1970s, only a dozen people have been charged under the law, and only five have resulted in convictions.

"The purpose of laws is to protect the community and to deter antisocial behavior. New York's adultery law has advanced neither of those," Lavin said in a statement Friday.

The law appears to have last been used in 2010 against a woman who was caught having sex in a park, but the adultery charge was later dropped as part of a plea deal.

New York came close to repealing the law in the 1960s after a state commission charged with evaluating criminal legislation said it was nearly impossible to enforce.

At the time, lawmakers initially agreed to repeal it, but decided to keep the law because one politician argued that repealing it would make it look like the state was officially endorsing infidelity, according to a 1965 New York Times article.