The Illustrated Guide to Criminal Law
Chapter 11: Excuse Me!
Excuse pg 18: Self-Induced Diminished Capacity
This defense almost always fails, because usually it’s the defendant himself who’s at fault for being in that condition in the first place.
Take Brian, for example. He got so liquored up at Luanne’s party that he blacked out. When he came to the next day, he learned that he had somehow drunkenly raped Luanne.
Montage fading to black as Brian drinks with friends, dances with others, dances drunkenly alone, collapses in chair. The fading to while as Luanne holds up her phone saying “It’s all on video, you creep!”
His intoxication certainly prevented him from knowing what he was doing, but that’s not going to be a defense, because he’s the one who got himself drunk.
Brian was drinking intentionally (or recklessly), so we’re basically applying that mens rea to whatever he did while intoxicated.
This panel is pretty sexist if you ask me. I thought it was common knowledge that black-out drunk people can’t consent to sex. How could such a person consent to committing the act of rape?
(hint: everything changes when the drunk person has a penis)
Try swapping Brian with Luanne and watch the legal implications get all jumbled up.
Oh can your neo-misogynist claptrap. What right minded person would say “your honor, she should have known getting drunk puts you at risk of being raped!” Drunken crimes are not the same as being a victim. Let’s change the crime. Say I’m walking down the sidewalk and you kill me with your car. Would you say “He bought shoes, he knew the danger.”
Brian is Guilty. Diminished capacity defense, sure. But guilty.
And you don’t consent to rape.
No, you missed the point he was trying to make. Brian was blacked-out drunk, not Luanne. When blacked-out drunk, you can’t legally consent to sex. How could Brian rape Luanne when technically, Brian is unable to consent? The question I think he’s raising is that is Brian capable of raping Luanne if Brian is unable to consent?
It’s tricky, and I don’t quite agree with him, but I think you were confused thinking he was saying Luanne was drunk and thus put herself at risk of rape.
His point is, “too drunk to rape is a valid defense.”
Except it’s not, because it’s the victim who knows if they were raped. The state will have evaluate the charges, decide if there was an actual crime, and etc etc, but Luanne’s perspective is the one that establishes the crime and initiates the proceedings.
I can go to the Police and accuse anyone I want with anything that amuses me, but without proof I’m just trolling for a misdemeanor.
Sexual assaults, btw, are notoriously hard to prove and despite Mr. Wah-wah-I-have-a-penis’s opinions the burden of proof still lies with the state. Brian is innocent until proven guilty, no matter what anyone wants to believe.
Actually, I’m saying “too drunk is NOT a valid defense.”
Diminished mental capacity only works when it’s not your fault. If it’s your own fault that you got drunk, then the law doesn’t excuse what you did while drunk.
Not so in the media atleast. But that’s a whole different domain.
Black out drunk doesn’t mean ‘can’t consent’, it means got so drunk that you can’t remember sections of the evening. That does not mean that said events didn’t happen and weren’t actively caused or initiated by you. Your decision making capacity was clearly reduced but since you chose to reduce it, that is a poor defense.
It would be equivalent to saying ‘ah but I would have never got behind the wheel when sober and since we all know that people who are black out drunk can’t consent to driving a motor vehicle, I’m not responsible for my drink driving – the car and the people who I hit are!’.
Passed out drunk would mean that indeed he couldn’t give consent but then it would also mean he couldn’t have actually committed the act due to being, you guessed it, passed out.
I think the tricky bit here, the bit that various people try to exploit for various political ends, is that if the situation was instead this:
Brian gets black out drunk but doesn’t rape Luanne. Instead he is boring and annoying all evening, whinging and bitching about men’s rights and how men should have more of them and women should have no rights at all, but because Luanne has a weird and creepy obsession with him she, ignoring his weak, badly slurred protestations and the fact he’s physically and intellectually repulsive, easily overpowers him and has sex with him against his will – taking advantage of his drunken state to force herself on him against his will then Luanne would be guilty of rape.
Despite the fact that Brian’s decision to lessen his capacities with alcohol made it harder for him to resist being overpowered, Brian is not at fault in that case (except maybe for his idiotic viewpoints but that aside I mean) and it should in no way lessen Luanne’s guilt that Brian was drunk; it merely made him vulnerable rather than actively causing the rape.
A final, different situation:
Brian and Luanne get black out drunk together and end up having sex with no rape involved despite Brian being a men’s rights activist. Later, already having significant others (hard to believe in Brian’s case but bear with me), they regret this (see more believable already). No one is guilty of rape in this case, merely poor judgement and showing little regard for their respective partners.
Hope that helps clear things up a bit.
TL:DR, getting drunk doesn’t mean you get a free pass at nonconsensual sex. It means you cannot give a consensual partner consent.
Not really.
Luanne gets drunk, tazes Brian, and then sodomizes him with an object -because he wanted it, the slut.
Brian goes to the police.
Luanne says, “I was black-out drunk, I couldn’t possibly have _chosen_ to sexually assault him because of my diminished capacity.”
Etc.
Nothing’s different. The actual sexual assault numbers vary dramatically (hint: men rape women far more often then the opposite) by gender.
ManYunSoo, you’re missing the point. The point isn’t whether Brian “consented” to committing the act of rape. The point is that his diminished mental capacity at the time is NOT the relevant mental state for this analysis.
If you get yourself drunk, our law won’t let that absolve you of responsibility for acts you then commit while drunk. You’re culpable for putting yourself in that state, and that culpability transfers to everything you did as a result.
As for what counts as rape or not, we get to that later. For this example, just take it as read that he did rape her while drunk.
Read on, self inflicted impairment doesn’t count. If the guy who had attacked a dragon and killed a girl had shot up first, he’s back on the hook.
No, nothing changes; because you didn’t complete the reversal. For a complete reversal, drunk Luanne would have committed the rape, and presumably would have been strong enough to do it over Brian’s objections, or else Brian is too drunk to consent or otherwise unable to do what he normally would have done.
To clarify: Luanne never gave consent, right? Otherwise, it would be reversed, and Luanne would be guilty.
Also, who’s the girl that videotaped this and didn’t report it to the police or something??
EDIT: Why didn’t she report it or intervene when it happened?
Fear of retribution?
Rape shaming?
Just two that came to mind, I’m sure there are plenty more
If neither party consented, would it not be a case of who had control over the encounter – or does it default to the male at fault.
It could easily be that the female overpowered or took advantage of the drunken state of the male.
I also think what ManYunSoo was trying to get across was the potential asymmetry of if a drunken female instigated a sexual encounter with a sober male, the male would be at fault, yet the gender-switched case isn’t equivalent.
What if both Brian and Luanne are black-out drunk during the event and have sex (it was concensual, but they were drunk, so legally it doesn’t count). Next morning they awaken in bed and have no recollection of yesterday’s events. Both are sure that he/she would never do something like that on his/her own volition, ergo the other one is the rapist. Both claim to be a victim of rape. Who (if any) will be prosecuted?