In the category of ‘I can’t believe this happened,’ in March 2021, the Minnesota State Supreme Court ruled that if a woman voluntarily imbibed alcohol and became intoxicated and was subsequently sexually assaulted, the assailant could not be convicted of rape because she was ‘not incapacitated.’
I’m still shaking my head over this one, which is about as mind-numbing as a 2011 case in New York City when two NYPD officers were acquitted of raping a drunk woman they were initially helping, because of a loophole in New York law that states that someone who becomes voluntarily intoxicated is not considered ‘mentally incapacitated’ for purposes of giving consent.
What this means in these and several other states, if a woman goes out to a club and has a few drinks too many, she’s fair game for any sexual predator who happens on the scene.
The laws, as far as I know, don’t address the situation where a person is drinking willingly but some has slipped GHB, ketamine, or Rohypnol (known as a ruffie) into her drink. Is this willing intoxication, or should it even matter?
Anyone who has ever had too much to drink can attest to the fact that your mental faculties are diminished. If someone administers one of the so-called ‘date rape drugs’ to you, you’re toast, and here’s why.
These or similar drugs are commonly used in some medical procedures such as colonoscopies, to enable the patient to be awake and responsive to a doctor’s directions, but when they wear off, the patient has no memory of what transpired.
I have undergone four such procedures over the past twelve years, and I can tell you with absolute certainty, they work. In each case, I remember seeing the needle going into my arm and being asked to count down from one hundred, and then the next thing I remember is waking up in recovery.
Except, in each case I’ve been told by the doctors and nurses that I was never asleep at any point of the procedure. For me, though, it’s as if someone took scissors and snipped out three or four hours of my life. I don’t even have faint impressions.
So, taking all the foregoing into account, one has to wonder why there would even be doubt that sexual assault is pardonable. When I was growing up, my grandmother, who raised me from the time I was 13, taught me that ‘no’ means ‘no.’
Thus, whether a woman has become willingly intoxicated, or has been drugged, is she in incapable of making a rational decision and someone else makes that decision for her—especially something to do with her body—it should be the person committing the act who is held responsible.
Cyrus Vance, the Manhattan DA who brought the loophole in the New York to light, strongly recommended that the state legislature look at the law and change it to acknowledge that any reasonable person would know that an intoxicated or drugged person, regardless of whether or not they got that way willingly is, in fact, mentally incapacitated.
We no longer live in an age when women were considered minors and wards of their husbands or male relatives, or when certain people were considered only a percentage human. We need to make sure our laws, and the application of those laws reflect reality. – NWI
