Minnesota Supreme Court Overturned Rape Conviction
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Minnesota court rules rape charge doesn't apply if the victim got willingly drunk
https://news.yahoo.com/minnesota-court-rules-rape-charge-125352182.htmlThe Minnesota Supreme Court on Wednesday ruled that a man who had sex with a woman while she was passed out on his couch cannot be found guilty of rape because the victim got herself drunk beforehand.
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The big picture: Minnesota is one of the many states that says that for a victim to be too mentally incapacitated to give consent, they must have become intoxicated against their will, such as if a person secretly drugged someone's drink,The ruling: https://mncourts.gov/mncourtsgov/media/Appellate/Supreme Court/Standard Opinions/OPA191281-032421.pdf
Don't know if the Minnesota legislature will get around to change this.
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@axtremus said in Minnesota Supreme Court Overturned Rape Conviction:
Minnesota court rules rape charge doesn't apply if the victim got willingly drunk
https://news.yahoo.com/minnesota-court-rules-rape-charge-125352182.htmlThe Minnesota Supreme Court on Wednesday ruled that a man who had sex with a woman while she was passed out on his couch cannot be found guilty of rape because the victim got herself drunk beforehand.
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The big picture: Minnesota is one of the many states that says that for a victim to be too mentally incapacitated to give consent, they must have become intoxicated against their will, such as if a person secretly drugged someone's drink,The ruling: https://mncourts.gov/mncourtsgov/media/Appellate/Supreme Court/Standard Opinions/OPA191281-032421.pdf
Don't know if the Minnesota legislature will get around to change this.
It's actually not that bad of a law. I can see the logic.
The army had an old saying...Nobody ever got raped in a top bunk.
Now, I am not defending rape, but is it rape when someone willingly and with aforethought puts themselves in such a situation? Or is it possibly some lesser charge?
And if somebody is that drunk, how do they know what they agreed or did not agree to?
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@jolly said in Minnesota Supreme Court Overturned Rape Conviction:
And if somebody is that drunk, how do they know what they agreed or did not agree to?
Let's extended this a little bit ... you got drunk and after you sober up you found that $20 is missing from your wallet. Was it theft? Would you make an argument that says "how do they know whether they agreed or did not agree to (give the money away)"?
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@axtremus said in Minnesota Supreme Court Overturned Rape Conviction:
@jolly said in Minnesota Supreme Court Overturned Rape Conviction:
And if somebody is that drunk, how do they know what they agreed or did not agree to?
Let's extended this a little bit ... you got drunk and after you sober up you found that $20 is missing from your wallet. Was it theft? Would you make an argument that says "how do they know whether they agreed or did not agree to (give the money away)"?
If it was @Aqua-Letifer or me in college, strong odds we used the $20 on a 3am IHOP or SHEETZ run.
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@89th said in Minnesota Supreme Court Overturned Rape Conviction:
@axtremus said in Minnesota Supreme Court Overturned Rape Conviction:
@jolly said in Minnesota Supreme Court Overturned Rape Conviction:
And if somebody is that drunk, how do they know what they agreed or did not agree to?
Let's extended this a little bit ... you got drunk and after you sober up you found that $20 is missing from your wallet. Was it theft? Would you make an argument that says "how do they know whether they agreed or did not agree to (give the money away)"?
If it was @Aqua-Letifer or me in college, strong odds we used the $20 on a 3am IHOP or SHEETZ run.
Understand the logic, just don't know what a SHEETZ run is....
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@axtremus said in Minnesota Supreme Court Overturned Rape Conviction:
@jolly said in Minnesota Supreme Court Overturned Rape Conviction:
And if somebody is that drunk, how do they know what they agreed or did not agree to?
Let's extended this a little bit ... you got drunk and after you sober up you found that $20 is missing from your wallet. Was it theft? Would you make an argument that says "how do they know whether they agreed or did not agree to (give the money away)"?
Back in the dim mists of time, when dinosaurs roamed the earth, if you got blitzed so bad you woke up screwed, blued and tatooed, you chalked it up to a hard earned education on your part. And you never put yourself in that situation again.
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@jolly said in Minnesota Supreme Court Overturned Rape Conviction:
@89th said in Minnesota Supreme Court Overturned Rape Conviction:
@axtremus said in Minnesota Supreme Court Overturned Rape Conviction:
@jolly said in Minnesota Supreme Court Overturned Rape Conviction:
And if somebody is that drunk, how do they know what they agreed or did not agree to?
Let's extended this a little bit ... you got drunk and after you sober up you found that $20 is missing from your wallet. Was it theft? Would you make an argument that says "how do they know whether they agreed or did not agree to (give the money away)"?
If it was @Aqua-Letifer or me in college, strong odds we used the $20 on a 3am IHOP or SHEETZ run.
Understand the logic, just don't know what a SHEETZ run is....
Sheetz is like Wawa, but better. Mostly in Pennsylvania and nearby states.
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@catseye3 said in Minnesota Supreme Court Overturned Rape Conviction:
A man who has sex with a passed-out woman needs a beatdown. A man with character and decency would never do such a thing.
+1
If that's what he wants, he should go buy an inflatable doll. -
@jolly said in Minnesota Supreme Court Overturned Rape Conviction:
@catseye3 What does it say about the woman?
It could say things like
- she's inexperienced with alcohol and didn't realize how it would affect her.
- she didn't know how much alcohol had been put in her drinks.
- she didn't know the medication she was taking affected how much alcohol she could handle.
- she thought the guy was a trustworthy and honorable person.
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@catseye3 said in Minnesota Supreme Court Overturned Rape Conviction:
@jolly Poor judgment.
Absolutely.
You know, when working with patients in sometimes some pretty tense situations, the first thing I learned was that people lie. Sometimes, a lot.
In the case of rape, the lab kept the rape box and was charged with legal chain of custody with all specimens. I've done a crapload of them. Because of that, you knew the results and would often follow the legal proceedings. Rape is a serious charge, with serious consequences...Forcible rape can land you in Angola for 40 years down here, simple rape for 25.
Simple justice demands a DA uses due diligence and good evidence before putting someone away for hard time like that. Sometimes, we saw familiar names go down the river for lengthy sentences. But sometimes, the accused won in court. And many times, a case never went to court, either because the prosecutors felt the sex was consensual or that the evidence simply could not support the charges.
A man (or a woman) can be an absolute cad, without a shred of decency or character. But I don't sentence people to The Farm for 25 years for character flaws on a he said/she said argument.
As a practical matter, don't put yourself in bad situations and bad things generally don't happen. That's pretty much the advice I gave my kids, not that they always followed it.
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Are there different criminal levels of rape? A guy taking advantage of a drunk girl is not the same as a guy hiding behind bushes and dragging joggers down to the creek...
There are different levels with the whole drunk girl scenario. too. Anything from a sober guy taking advantage of an unconscious girl on one end of the spectrum to two drunk kids having sex and the girl regretting it the next morning on the other end...
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Malcolm Gladwell has an interesting chapter on the "drunk rape" phenomenon.
People can become so blindingly drunk that they have no recollection of anything happening, even though they appear to be functioning pretty normally.
https://bigthink.com/surprising-science/alcohol-malcolm-gladwell?rebelltitem=1#rebelltitem1
n his new book, Talking to Strangers, Malcolm Gladwell uses the infamous Brock Turner incident as a case study in alcoholism and behavior. A brief recap: Turner, drunk, meets the anonymously-named Emily Doe, also drunk (and also, since the publication of Gladwell's book, no longer anonymous). They dance, they walk, they stumble, he sexually assaults the unconscious undergrad, then later blames the alcohol.
During the hearings, in fact, alcohol seemed to be the culprit of everything that went wrong, from Chanel Miller's blackout (it was the culprit) to Turner's masculine aggression (it wasn't). Alcohol is often invoked as the true villain in such circumstances, the insidious agent causing mayhem inside the mind of the attacker. Remove alcohol from the situation and a saint appears — or so the argument goes.
Is that really the case? It's true that alcohol changes you — literally. Your conception of "self" is transformed. After saying hello to your frontal lobes, the brain region that governs, among other things, motivation and attention, alcohol moseys over to the amygdala, the switchboard operator of your fight-flight-freeze mechanism. Turning it down a notch, you become disinhibited; the very conception of "I" must be reconsidered.>
Eventually, inevitably, alcohol — too much of it, anyway — seeps into your cerebellum. Balance and coordination are coopted. Finally, if you keep drinking, alcohol makes a final visit to your hippocampus, the brain region responsible for memories. Once you hit .08, your hippocampi (they're a pair) struggle to keep up. A bit more and your brain will never imprint the experience. "You," no longer in any sense the you you recognize, are no longer checked in.
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@george-k said in Minnesota Supreme Court Overturned Rape Conviction:
People can become so blindingly drunk that they have no recollection of anything happening, even though they appear to be functioning pretty normally.
I call that Friday Night at TNCR
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@george-k said in Minnesota Supreme Court Overturned Rape Conviction:
Malcolm Gladwell has an interesting chapter on the "drunk rape" phenomenon.
People can become so blindingly drunk that they have no recollection of anything happening, even though they appear to be functioning pretty normally.
https://bigthink.com/surprising-science/alcohol-malcolm-gladwell?rebelltitem=1#rebelltitem1
n his new book, Talking to Strangers, Malcolm Gladwell uses the infamous Brock Turner incident as a case study in alcoholism and behavior. A brief recap: Turner, drunk, meets the anonymously-named Emily Doe, also drunk (and also, since the publication of Gladwell's book, no longer anonymous). They dance, they walk, they stumble, he sexually assaults the unconscious undergrad, then later blames the alcohol.
During the hearings, in fact, alcohol seemed to be the culprit of everything that went wrong, from Chanel Miller's blackout (it was the culprit) to Turner's masculine aggression (it wasn't). Alcohol is often invoked as the true villain in such circumstances, the insidious agent causing mayhem inside the mind of the attacker. Remove alcohol from the situation and a saint appears — or so the argument goes.
Is that really the case? It's true that alcohol changes you — literally. Your conception of "self" is transformed. After saying hello to your frontal lobes, the brain region that governs, among other things, motivation and attention, alcohol moseys over to the amygdala, the switchboard operator of your fight-flight-freeze mechanism. Turning it down a notch, you become disinhibited; the very conception of "I" must be reconsidered.>
Eventually, inevitably, alcohol — too much of it, anyway — seeps into your cerebellum. Balance and coordination are coopted. Finally, if you keep drinking, alcohol makes a final visit to your hippocampus, the brain region responsible for memories. Once you hit .08, your hippocampi (they're a pair) struggle to keep up. A bit more and your brain will never imprint the experience. "You," no longer in any sense the you you recognize, are no longer checked in.
In the case of the original article, it was established that the female had five shots of vodka before the accused approached her. He later took her home and she left willingly with him.
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It's not the woman committing the crime.
She's drunk. That's not a crime, and it's something most of us have done.
The man is the one committing the sexual assault. Saying it isn't rape solely because she's drunk is ridiculous.
If he throws her in the river and she drowns, is anybody going to seriously claim that he's innocent of murder?
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@doctor-phibes said in Minnesota Supreme Court Overturned Rape Conviction:
It's not the woman committing the crime.
She's drunk. That's not a crime, and it's something most of us have done.
The man is the one committing the sexual assault. Saying it isn't rape solely because she's drunk is ridiculous.
So, you'd put the guy away for 25 years?
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@jolly said in Minnesota Supreme Court Overturned Rape Conviction:
@doctor-phibes said in Minnesota Supreme Court Overturned Rape Conviction:
It's not the woman committing the crime.
She's drunk. That's not a crime, and it's something most of us have done.
The man is the one committing the sexual assault. Saying it isn't rape solely because she's drunk is ridiculous.
So, you'd put the guy away for 25 years?
I didn't say that. No, I don't think I would.
I'd put him away for 25 years if he threw her in the river.