Updated September 2026 | The Bulldog Law | California Criminal and Immigration Defense
Bigamy is marrying one person while still legally married to another. California makes it a crime under Penal Code 281, punishable under Penal Code 283 as a misdemeanor with up to one year in county jail and a $10,000 fine, or as a felony with 16 months, two, or three years in custody. The second marriage is void regardless of what anyone intended. Penal Code 282 carves out two exceptions: a spouse who has been absent for five years and is not known to be alive, and a prior marriage that was dissolved or annulled by a court. And since 1956, an honest, reasonable belief that the first marriage had ended is a defense. Polygamy, the practice of multiple marriages, is not a separate crime in California; the statute punishes the legal act of marrying, not a household arrangement.
The Bulldog Law's attorneys almost never meet a bigamy client at a police station. We meet them at the immigration office. A marriage-based green card petition gets denied because a prior marriage in another country was never dissolved; a naturalization interview turns up a first spouse the applicant forgot to list; a divorce that everyone assumed was final turns out to have stalled at the courthouse in 2014. Those are the facts that generate bigamy referrals in California, and they sit at the exact intersection of criminal and immigration law that our firm was built to handle. What follows is the law itself, the defenses that actually resolve these cases, and the immigration consequences that usually matter more than the criminal ones. If you've just discovered a prior marriage is still on the books, call (888) 928-1609 or message our team before you file anything else.
The statute: Penal Code 281 through 284
Penal Code 281 defines the crime in a sentence: every person having a spouse living, who marries or enters into a registered domestic partnership with any other person, is guilty of bigamy. Three elements follow. The defendant was legally married. That marriage was still in effect. The defendant then went through a marriage with someone else. Nothing in the statute requires deception, cohabitation, or any contact between the two spouses. A person who marries in Fresno in 2010, separates, and marries again in Sacramento in 2020 without ever filing for divorce has committed bigamy on the day of the second ceremony, even if the first spouse has not been heard from in years.
Penal Code 282 lists the situations the statute does not reach. If the former spouse has been absent for five successive years without being known to the defendant to be living during that time, the second marriage is not bigamy. And if the prior marriage was annulled or dissolved by the judgment of a competent court, obviously, there is no living spouse. Penal Code 283 sets the punishment, a wobbler, meaning the district attorney chooses between misdemeanor and felony filing, and the judge can later reduce a felony to a misdemeanor. Penal Code 284 reaches the other side of the aisle: a person who knowingly marries someone who is already married commits a separate offense, punishable by a fine of at least $5,000 or a term in county jail.
Two details in the statute trip people up. First, registered domestic partnerships count on both ends; a person in an undissolved domestic partnership who marries commits bigamy, and vice versa. Second, the statute says marries, and California defines marriage as a civil contract requiring a license and solemnization. A religious ceremony without a license is not a legal marriage, which is why the polygamy question below is less simple than it looks.
Bigamy versus polygamy
The words get used interchangeably and they are not the same. Bigamy is an act: the second legal marriage. Polygamy is a practice: maintaining multiple spouses at once, typically through religious ceremonies within a community that recognizes them. In the United States, plural marriages are almost never registered with the state, because the second license would be refused or would be a crime to obtain. So the polygamist usually has one civil marriage and several religious ones, and the question under Penal Code 281 becomes whether a religious ceremony that everyone involved calls a marriage is a marriage for purposes of the statute.
California has not answered that cleanly. The statute punishes marrying; family law says an unlicensed ceremony creates no marriage; but prosecutors have argued that a person who purports to marry, holding a ceremony and holding out the relationship as a marriage, has done what the statute prohibits. Prosecutions of religious polygamists in California are close to nonexistent, partly because of that ambiguity and partly because of constitutional concerns. Utah, the state with the most plural marriages, reduced bigamy among consenting adults to an infraction in 2020. California has not changed its statute, but it also has not used it against plural families in living memory. What is clearly not a crime anywhere in California is living with multiple partners without marrying any of them.
How bigamy actually happens
Deliberate bigamists, the traveling salesman with a family in two cities, exist and get prosecuted, usually after one spouse discovers the other and after money is involved. But the cases our attorneys handle are overwhelmingly accidental, and they follow a few patterns.
The divorce that never finished. A couple separates, one of them files, the case stalls, nobody pays the final fee or submits the judgment, and years later both of them believe they are divorced. California requires a signed and filed judgment of dissolution; a petition is not a divorce, and neither is a six-month waiting period that expired. The spouse who remarries first is the bigamist, and the second marriage is void.
The foreign divorce California doesn't recognize. A divorce obtained abroad by mail, or in a country where neither spouse was domiciled, or a religious divorce with no civil counterpart, may be invalid here. A person who remarries in California relying on it has, in the state's eyes, a living spouse. The reverse pattern is just as common: a marriage abroad, religious or customary, that the person never considered a real marriage, but that the foreign country registered and that immigration authorities will find.
The presumed death. A spouse who vanished is presumed alive for purposes of Penal Code 281 until five years have passed without any indication otherwise. Remarrying at year three, on the sincere belief the person is dead, is bigamy unless the good-faith defense applies.
Each of those patterns produces the same practical result: the crime is discovered by a document check, not a complaint. Marriage license applications ask about prior marriages under penalty of perjury. Immigration forms ask more insistently. Probate courts, pension administrators, and insurance companies ask when money is at stake. The prosecution, when it comes, is usually a byproduct.
Defenses
Good-faith belief. The defense that resolves most accidental bigamy cases comes from People v. Vogel, a 1956 California Supreme Court decision holding that a defendant who honestly and reasonably believed his prior marriage had ended, by divorce or by the death of his spouse, is not guilty of bigamy. The belief has to be reasonable as well as sincere. A person who was served with a final judgment and remarried anyway is fine. A person who never checked, ignored letters from the court, or knew the divorce had been dismissed is not. Our attorneys build this defense out of court records, correspondence, and the timeline of what the client knew and when.
The first marriage was never valid. Bigamy requires a living spouse, which requires a valid prior marriage. A first marriage that was itself void, because one party was already married, or underage without consent, or because the ceremony was never licensed, creates no spouse, and the second marriage is not bigamous. Establishing this often means proving facts from another state or country.
The exceptions in Penal Code 282. Five years of unexplained absence, or a court judgment ending the prior marriage before the second one, defeat the charge outright. The five-year rule is measured strictly, and the absence must be genuine; a spouse who was reachable but ignored does not count.
The second marriage was not a marriage. If the later ceremony was religious only, unlicensed, and never registered, the defense that no marriage occurred is available, and it is stronger than the prosecution's purporting-to-marry theory in most courts.
Statute of limitations. Bigamy is complete on the day of the second marriage, and as a wobbler it carries a three-year limitations period. A second marriage from 2019 discovered in 2026 is not prosecutable, though its civil and immigration consequences remain. Cases that do get filed within the window are often ones a prosecutor will dismiss once the good-faith facts are presented, and our page on what a dismissal does and doesn't end explains the aftermath. Where a case is weak for any of these reasons, it tends to show the signs early, and many resolve through diversion or a plea structured to avoid the collateral consequences below.
The civil side: a void marriage and the putative spouse
Whatever happens in criminal court, family law treats a bigamous marriage as void from the beginning under Family Code 2201. It does not need an annulment to be invalid, though people obtain one to have a court record. The consequences run through everything the marriage touched: community property, spousal support, inheritance, insurance beneficiaries, the presumption of paternity for children born during it.
California softens the blow for the innocent party. Under the putative spouse doctrine in Family Code 2251, a person who believed in good faith that the marriage was valid is treated as a spouse for property division and support, and can inherit. The bigamist gets no such protection. Children of a void marriage are legitimate and have full rights regardless. Untangling a decade of finances built on a void marriage is often the most expensive part of a bigamy discovery, and it proceeds in family court whether or not the district attorney ever files.
Immigration: where the real damage is
For a non-citizen, or for a citizen petitioning for a spouse, the criminal statute is the smaller problem. A marriage that is void for bigamy cannot support an immigrant visa or green card; the I-130 petition is denied on that basis alone, and if the prior marriage was omitted from the forms, the omission is a willful misrepresentation of a material fact under federal immigration law, which is a permanent bar to admission absent a waiver. Applicants who list every prior marriage and prove each one ended, with certified judgments and, for foreign divorces, evidence of validity, avoid the bar. Applicants who leave one off, even innocently, can spend years litigating it. Federal law separately declares practicing polygamists inadmissible, a provision that predates the modern immigration code and still gets applied.
A bigamy conviction itself may be treated as a crime involving moral turpitude, depending on the record of conviction and the circuit, and a felony version with a sentence of a year or more can be worse. Before any non-citizen client enters a plea in a bigamy case, our immigration attorneys analyze the consequences of the specific charge and, usually, coordinate the criminal resolution with a pending or planned petition. Bigamy is one of a handful of offenses, alongside marriage and benefits fraud, where handling the criminal case without the immigration case is malpractice waiting to happen; our immigration practice exists so that our clients never have to.
Cleaning it up
Discovering an undissolved prior marriage is fixable, in this order. Confirm the status of the first marriage with certified records from the court or country where it began and, if a divorce was filed, from that court. If it was never finalized, finalize it now; California allows a dissolution to proceed even where the other spouse cannot be found, by publication. Then address the second marriage: an annulment for a void marriage, followed by a new, valid marriage once the first is dissolved, if the couple wants one. Correct any government form that omitted the prior marriage, with counsel, before the omission is found. And if a criminal case has been filed, the same records that prove the good-faith belief are the defense. A conviction, if one happens, is generally eligible for expungement after probation.
Frequently asked questions
What is bigamy in simple terms?
Marrying someone while you are still legally married to someone else. In California it's a crime under Penal Code 281, and the second marriage is void as a matter of family law. Bigamy is about the legal act of marrying; it doesn't matter whether the two spouses know about each other, live together, or ever met.
Is bigamy a felony in California?
It's a wobbler. Under Penal Code 283, bigamy can be charged as a misdemeanor, with up to one year in county jail and a fine of up to $10,000, or as a felony with a sentence of 16 months, two years, or three years. Most cases that are filed at all are filed as misdemeanors. The person who knowingly marries a bigamist can be charged separately under Penal Code 284.
What is the difference between bigamy and polygamy?
Bigamy is the criminal act: entering a second legal marriage while the first is still in effect. Polygamy describes the practice or lifestyle of having multiple spouses, which in the United States is done through religious ceremonies that are not registered as legal marriages. California's statute punishes the legal act of marrying, so a person with one civil marriage and additional religious ceremonies is in a legal gray area that depends on whether the later ceremonies were held out as marriages. Living with multiple partners without marrying any of them is not a crime.
Can you be charged with bigamy if you thought you were divorced?
Usually not, if the belief was honest and reasonable. Since People v. Vogel in 1956, California has recognized a good-faith belief that the prior marriage ended, by divorce or death, as a defense to bigamy. Most modern cases are exactly this: a divorce that was filed but never finalized, a default judgment that was never entered, a foreign divorce California doesn't recognize. The defense depends on what you knew and what a reasonable person in your position would have done to confirm it.
How does bigamy affect immigration?
Severely, and usually before anyone thinks about criminal charges. A bigamous marriage is void, so a marriage-based green card petition built on it fails, and an undisclosed prior marriage on an immigration form is a material misrepresentation that can bar the applicant for life. Federal law also makes practicing polygamists inadmissible. Most bigamy cases our attorneys see start as immigration problems, which is why we handle both sides together.
Related reading from our attorneys
- Deportation consequences of criminal convictions
- Fraud defense in California
- Perjury under Penal Code 118
A prior marriage just surfaced? Call before you file anything
The Bulldog Law defends bigamy and marriage-related charges across California and handles the immigration petitions, waivers, and family-law cleanup that come with them, under one roof. Visit our criminal defense page, call (888) 928-1609, or reach us online. The order in which these problems get fixed matters, and the first conversation is confidential.