Just like Obama, you’d have to produce your birth certificate.
I think it’s an interesting question. Ignoring the Appeals Court ruling, which may have already put this to bed, from what I understand from this thread:
Handjob: Sexual contact (legally not as bad as sexual assault)
Rubbing clitoris: Sexual contact (legally not as bad as sexual assault)
Rubbing labia: Sexual contact (etc.)
Finger slips in slightly: Sexual assault!
Also, I could imagine a legislature finding a difference between sticking a carrot or bottle or something like that into someone’s anus and sticking a finger in there. One does seem more like assault than the other.
Also, it’s a defense lawyer’s job to try and find a loophole or technicality to get his client released or at least found guilty of something lesser.
There was really a lot of bad faith in this thread, and it wasn’t from the OP.
Haha good point. Nobody ever seems to get good native objects embedded in their arm anymore, these days it’s this foreign shit all the time.
Yeh, back in the day a friend and his cousin used good old North American air guns that embeded Pop Rocks in their arms and torsos in the shoot-out they had against themselves. Times have changed. 
I respectfully disagree. The method of looking for a loophole where you arbitrarily redefine ordinary words, and twist the clear intention of the law, is not in good faith at all.
Unfortunately, the actual good-faith position in this particular case is to stand up and say “It appears my client is guilty, and I believe this trial should proceed to sentencing without further delay”; that’s probably in conflict with the duty of a defense lawyer.
I wish you would address the points I tried to make regarding the law in question, though. And, a defense lawyer would not be doing his or her job if he stood up and just threw his/her client under the bus like that. If a lawyer doesn’t think he/she can defend a particular person, the lawyer should step aside.
One thing ,that hasn’t been mentioned in this semantics game is the distinction between object and foreign object. Because I think if the intent of the law was to disqualify a finger, that is an important distinction and they would’ve used the qualifier. And the existence of the qualifier supports the stance that a finger is an object. As it is, I just parse “any object” as legalese for “anything”.
No, I can’t see this at all. I think every English speaker would readily agree that a finger is an object. In fact, I think the only debate here is whether it’s possible to stretch the definition of what an object is so far outside of its plain meaning that a finger is excluded.
Back in the 80’s, when Turner Broadcasting owned WCW wrestling, a memo was sent down from the CEO to use the word “international” instead of “foreign” when reporting on CNN and all the other Turner owned stations. But the tiny wrestling organization that also got the memo decided not to make waves. And for a while the announcers started referring (mostly tongue-in-cheek, I believe) to “international objects” being used to gouge eyes. It was a fun time.
A different approach is to simply have a crime of sexual assault that is statutorily defined as being an intentional assault of a sexual nature, define assault as an application or threatened application of force without consent, and then leave it to the judge to take it from there (subject to appeal) rather than draft a statute that invites the opponents to go down the reductio ad absurdum rabbit hole by arguing the minutiae of a micro-managing statute.
I agree that that’s a way to define these things, but (from what I gather from this thread) West Virginia didn’t go down that path.
Here are my points, and to be clear, this is not a hill I’m willing to die on:
- Rape is rape – PIV, etc., is the worst crime.
- Sexual assault is next, and that involves putting an “object”, not defined by statute, into a sexual orifice. In my opinion, putting a bottle, stick, broom handle, etc., is more degrading than slipping a finger in.
- Sexual contact is next, still a crime, but a lesser crime. That would include hand jobs, clitoral stimulation, rubbing vulva. Slipping a finger in is more like this than jamming a broom handle in, for example.
I need a shower after typing all of that. However, I’m not the W. VA legislature. They decided that a hand job or clitoral stimulation is sexual contact. IMO, slipping a finger in is more like that than jamming a bottle into a sexual orifice.
Ugh. I agree this discussion is gross. However, the law is the law, and a defense lawyer’s job is to help his client either walk away or be charged with the least crime possible. Other states, no doubt, define these differently, and I would be fine with defining all of these things that aren’t rape as sexual assault.
Further, I agree this is probably moot, based on the Appeals Court ruling. It does seem like the legislature did a crappy job in defining the various crimes – should a hand job and clitoral stimulation be a lesser crime than accidentally slipping a finger in? I think they should both be heinous crimes, but W. Va decided that a hand job is sexual contact.
Am I being at all clear? This isn’t my opinion – my opinion is that this is all sexual assault. However, the W. Va legislature has made a distinction between sexual contact and assault, and a finger in seems more like contact than a broom handle, which is clearly assault.
Maybe this will earn me my first pitting. I think there is an interesting law question here, though, because of how the legislature wrote it up.
Once again, this is all sexual assault in my book, but I’m not a W. Va legislator.
RitterSport, you keep talking about what West Virginia did and did not do, but it’s not clear to me that you quite grasp what they did, because you seem to be mixing up the terms.
For example, there is, literally, no crime of rape in the West Virginia statute. What you are calling rape is defined as sexual assault. There is also no crime of sexual contact. Like sexual intrusion, sexual contact is a term of definition that can, in certain cases, be an element of a crime, usually the crime of sexual abuse.
There are basically two different named sexual offenses: sexual assault and sexual abuse. For each named sexual offense, there are three levels of severity: first degree, second degree, and third degree. There are also some separate laws involving people in positions of authority who have sexual relations with people under their supervision (corrections and parole officers, etc.)
As for your own hierarchy of heinousness, I’d disagree with that in a few ways too. For example, you say that “I would be fine with defining all of these things that aren’t rape as sexual assault.” Personally, I don’t see why it’s less horrible to penetrate an unwilling person with an object than it is to penetrate them with a penis.
There has been considerable recognition, over the past couple of decades, that non-consensual penetration can be equally traumatic no matter what the particular object inserted is. The FBI, some years back, updated the definition of “rape” in its Uniform Crime Report to include any non-consensual penetration by any body part or object.
Seven states follow the same pattern, defining all forms of non-consensual sexual penetration as rape. Many states, including my own state of California, legally define rape, but classify other forms of sexual penetration as different types of crime. That’s how Brock Turner, the Stanford asshole, got convicted of sexual assault rather than rape a few years back. And the biggest group of states—22 plus the District of Columbia, by my count—adopts the same practice as West Virginia: they don’t legally define rape, but define all forms of non-consensual penetration as the same crime.
Personally, I like the FBI’s definition best: rape is non-consensual penetration, whatever it is that’s doing the penetrating. And I would define unwanted touching of the external genitalia as sexual assault.
But however you want to define rape or sexual assault or whatever, I’ll stand by my argument that a finger is, always has been, and always will be, an object.
I think it’s weird that you associate language normally used with consensual sexal activities (hand job, clitoral stimulation) with legal statutes about sexal assault.
The points were more of the pettifogging that has peppered the thread. And - yes, so be it, let the lawyer step aside.
English-speaking law needs to borrow the German word “irgendetwas” - “anysomething”.
I don’t consider it responsible, or anybody’s duty, to lie and cheat to try to get their client off the hook.
King Arthur’s fingers were objects . . . objets d’art.
mhendo, thanks for laying it out so clearly. This was exactly the type of response I had in mind. I obviously misread the OP, or the writer of the OP didn’t lay this out clearly, because I had a very different impression of the actual law than what you skillfully explained.
I don’t mean to give the wrong impression here. I just didn’t know how to describe sexual contact as a different thing than sexual assault. Turns out, they aren’t different crimes anyway. To me, if it’s not consensual, it’s sexual assault.