My opinion is that if you make a bad decision because you, in a sound state of mind, decided to impair your own judgment - tough shit.
If Bill Gates gets hammered and signs away his money - too bad, unless someone A.) slipped something in his drink so he could not anticipate his level of intoxication or B.) waited till he was unconscious and forged his signature to make him THINK he consented.
But in case A, he hadn’t decided to impair his judgment, and in case B, he didn’t make the decision to hand over the money. So my first sentence sums it up succinctly.
Convicted, I couldn’t answer to, but if you were still UK resident in the mid 1990s then you might have heard of Austen Donnellan, who was prosecuted for the rape of a Miss X who not only agreed to but enthusiastically demanded sex. Her line was that he knew perfectly well that when sober she considered him six kinds of a creep who she wouldn’t touch with a borrowed bargepole (tho’ from the linked article, he was good enough to listen to her stories about who else she’d been fucking), and although the jury decided this did not after all invalidate her consent, the college authorities were all for having him sent down on the basis of her complaint long before it ever got to court. Independent newspaper archive.
Did you read the OP? The line was drawn between too drunk to consent but still coherent and communicating. Many women, and men, do things in this state of mind that they regret later. If someone in this state is not able to legally consent to sex then the possibility of charges being pressed will depend solely on how the woman “feels” about the encounter afterwards.
I wasn’t asking about the OP scenario, I was asking about your own assertion that anything short of unconsciouness should be fair game.
The possibility of charges being pressed depend on the evidence. She can make an accusation, but that in itself, absent any evidence of force or witnesses or any evidence of incapacity will not result in charges.
Barely concious and incoherent is functionally passed out. I doubt anyone in that state would have much of a memory of the act occuring and almost certainly could not give consent. Of course that is rape.
No, I don’t believe he said anything of the sort - only that if she voluntarily gets drunk enough that her judgment is impaired, but not to unconsciousness, this should not be held to invalidate her consent.
You can be prosecuted for actions done while drunk. The law clearly thinks you are responsible for your own actions, even when drunk. If you can be prosecuted for a crime, you can consent to sex.
(Obviously my opinion on how it should be, not a statement of law).
Ordinarily I don’t like hypotheticals, but this seems to demand one. Girl goes out with nothing more in mind than having a good time and getting sloshed. Girl happens to meet a guy and sleeps with him - in her drunken haze she doesn’t ask his HIV status, and she ends up HIV-positive. In a situation like this, who’s accountable?
I think that’s the part of your question that spoils it. If someone is still coherent, they can make sense of what is happening to them, what they’re doing and can determine whether or not they want to do something. I’d put the “too drunk to consent” point at the level where you are no longer able to think coherently.
Noel Prosequi, I summon you. Give us some info on the law.
Well, some rules have to be hard. Crap, I’m a situationist & I’m telling a religious nut this. But I sympathize with your position. The law gets in a quagmire here.
Oddly, your second paragraph is…not actually technically wrong. If one has a relationship where one or both partners have permission to fuck the other’s unconscious form, then OK.
But I don’t know about agreeing to a state generally out of people’s sex lives. If their sex lives rely on coercion, misrepresentation, or reckless promiscuity–if people are getting hurt–then let the state in I say.
Surely you’re wrong: that’s what laws are for. When you can’t know whether your action is illegal until you meet the 12 folks sitting in judgment, you’re no longer subject to the rule of law.
Many times, unfortunately, relationships are based on those factors. It is the individuals path of self discovery that will help them chose the correct partner based on past error. Getting the state involved basically places blame when both people are really learning how to really connect, and inhibits them for that self discovery path.
The guy. “I am not going to knowingly infect you with a life-threatening illness” seems like a pretty safe implied condition of her consent - you’d have to be a complete idiot to not see why it would affect most people’s decision, and it’s sufficiently rare that the onus is on you to bring it up. Just like you couldn’t sell someone a faulty car then claim “Hey, he didn’t ask if it was going to explode fifty metres down the road!”
