I’m a peace-loving hippie, but I doubt many juries would convict a guy for shooting an armed intruder who’s in the same room with their child. He lucked out emotionally, sure–there’s gotta be emotional fallback from killing someone in front of your daughter–but legally, I doubt he was in much danger.
Daniel
I’m a police officer. The homeowner called 911.
:smack: I totally misread the story, Loach. Sorry!
Daniel
To clarify I arrived at the door just as the knucklehead came out, holding a knife in his bloody hand (he cut it on the window).
In that case you did come within about half a second of a long legal entanglement, perhaps not with the court system, though.
I have heard that some places consider drunk rape to occur even if both partners are drunk at the same time to similar levels of inebriation. Is this true? If so then I would expect many (most?) non t-total married couples will have raped each other some new years eve or other similar date during their married lives together.
But nothing happened to the other woman…right? 
Who are you? The Rapenator? What makes you think you wouldn’t go to someone’s dorm or frat house only to get his ass kicked by six of his friends?
I’m not sure why this would be considered unreasonable. In many states, if someone is sufficiently intoxicated that their judgement is impaired, and you have sex with them, that’s legally considered rape. And rape being a defined crime, I think that the legal definition is relevant. That just leaves the question of whether a person is sufficiently drunk as to impair judgement, but if a person has sex due to alcohol that she wouldn’t ordinarily have, I can’t see any way to argue that the alcohol didn’t impair her judgement. A married couple getting drunk and making whoopie on New Year’s Eve probably wouldn’t fall into this category, since that’s presumably sex that they would have had sober, anyway.
The real problem here is a lack of consistency in the definitions. Typically, the posters, rallies, etc. that quote the 1 in 4 figure don’t make it clear that they’re including “date rape” in its various forms (pressured sex, drunken sex, etc.) in the definition, leaving the audience with mental images of knifepoint down a dark alley, and the like. This is counterproductive to the cause of reducing rape, since many rapists probably don’t even know that what they’re doing is rape. Public outreach like this might convince guys not to lurk in dark corners to pounce on unsuspecting strangers (which is, of course, a good thing to convince guys of), but it won’t do anything to stop the fellow who gets a cute girl at a party stinking drunk before taking her upstairs.
Well, I’ve been raped I reckon. I know I’ve had sex with women that I wouldn’t have if I had been sober.
What about people who get drunk for the purpose of being able to have sex that would normally ruin their reputation? If a woman doesn’t want to have sex, shouldn’t she be aware of the fact that alcohol impairs judgement and decreases inhibition and stop drinking? I don’t want to condone those tactics among men, but I don’t think it warrants a felony conviction, either.
So unless I want sex, I shouldn’t drink? Please explain if this is not what you mean.
Yes, if you know that drinking loosens your inhibitions and you don’t want those inhibitions loosened, don’t drink.
To turn that around, should a man be charged with a felony for having consentual sex with an intoxicated woman who knows her judgment is impaired when she drinks?
No no, everybody totally missed my point. I’m not talking about vigilante justice being the right answer. I’m talking about the possibility of vigilante justice being a better deterrant if it was more common. People who engage in blind vigilante justice are acting like idiots, but when they go to jail (or get shot by a cop like in the case above) and their actions are publicized it might serve as a deterrant to hundreds of rapists. It’s kind of how burglaries are good for the lock industry. I’m not saying burglaries are good, but if the lock industry was very important it might be a proper social trade off to increase the number of burglaries to boost lock industry. Fortunately, nobody cares about the lock industry. However, rape prevention is very important.
I don’t know, does anybody actually claim that a drunk person aware of the fact that sex is about to happen and actively consenting and engaging in it can be considered rape? (I know legally it could be, but ethically?)
Can you honestly claim that if you say yes and enthusiastically engage in something and possibly even initiate it that you will wake up feeling wronged and violated even remotely in the same way as people who were unconscious or worse yet actively said “No”. Don’t you think it cheapens their situation somewhat?
Fuck, rape is horrible, but where’s the personal responsibility here? If you get drunk and rob a liquor store the same argument can be used to claim you did not have the necessary mens rea to commit the crime since you were drunk. I think the standard for consent should be roughly the same as the standard for mens rea. Even with that standard in mind, I still feel OPs 25% is in the right ballpark.
Yes, if the intoxicated person “is under the influence of an intoxicant to a degree which renders that person incapable of appraising the person’s conduct, and the defendant knows of such condition,” the state of Wisconsin will certainly claim, legally and ethically, that the drunk person was sexually assaulted.
By the way, not directed to anyone in particular, but there is no “t” in consensual.
Because the way the question is phrased (“have you ever had sex you wouldn’t have had otherwise because of alcohol?”), I (a male) would answer yes. But, I’ve decidedly never been raped.
If they marked me down as having been raped based on answering yes to that question, they would be wrong. And they would have an inflated rape statistic as a result.
Does a person have to say “no” in order for it to be rape? Let’s suppose that the woman is drunk and the man is sober. They have sex that she didn’t want to have, but she was too drunk to offer any resistance. That’s rape, right? Even if the guy feels that she just submitted, didn’t put up a fight, didn’t say no? I mean legally, since I’m sure people’s opinions will be all over the place on this one.
However, what if both under the influence of an intoxicant to a degree which renders them incapable of appraising each others conduct and they are nevertheless both aware of each other’s respective condition and choose to engage in intercourse?
You see the problem with that definition, no? Somebody who can be deemed to be incapable of forming consent should not be deemed capable to commit rape themselves in the same state. So your definition of mental state (intoxicated, disabled, etc.) that precludes somebody from giving consent to sexual intercourse automatically has to be such that the person is not capable of committing rape themselves, otherwise you run into the problem of two people in an identical state raping each other, which doesn’t make sense (although legally happens all the time, at least in California, hell any sex with a person under the age of 18 is at least a misdemeanor sexual assault so two people under the age of 18 having sex rape each other).
I’ll try to remember what I picked up in that law class a few years ago:
It depends on the situation. If Joe Rapist breaks into a woman’s home, holds her at knifepoint and has sex with her, it’s still rape even if she never actually says “no” because she too afraid to resist. In that case, it’s reasonable to assume that Joe Rapist knew that the sex was non-consensual.
In your example, the man can tell that the woman is drunk and thus unable to give consent, so it’s still rape.
If the accused can prove that he believed that the woman had given consent(and never withdrew it), and that belief is one that a “reasonable” person could have held in that situation, then it’s not rape.