DawgTalkers.net Forums DawgTalk Everything Else... Man can’t be charged with rape because woman chose to drink beforehand.

I can't wrap my mind around this one. This isn't some podunk municipal venue, this is a state supreme court. Nothing like a verdict such as this to encourage groups of degenerate men looking for drunk victims to legally rape.

"A Minnesota man can’t be charged with felony rape because the woman chose to drink beforehand, court rules"

msn.com

After a 20-year-old woman took five shots of vodka and a prescription pill, she said she was standing outside a Minneapolis bar in May 2017 when a man invited her and a friend to a party. She agreed but soon found out there was no gathering, she later testified.

(iStock)© iStock/iStock (iStock)
She “blacked out” instead, waking up on a couch and found that the man she had just met was allegedly sexually assaulting her, according to court records.

Almost four years later, the Minnesota Supreme Court unanimously ruled this week that Francios Momolu Khalil, 24, cannot be found guilty of rape because the woman got drunk voluntarily beforehand. The decision Wednesday overturned Khalil’s prior conviction of third-degree criminal sexual conduct, which had been upheld by an appeals court, and granted him the right to a new trial.

The ruling also poured fuel on an effort in the Minnesota legislature to expand the state’s definition of “mentally incapacitated” to include voluntary intoxication so that defendants such as Khalil can be convicted of more serious offenses.

At issue in Khalil’s case was a state law that says a person is only considered “mentally incapacitated” and incapable of consenting to sex if they are intoxicated on substances “administered to that person without the person’s agreement,” like if someone spikes a punch bowl at a party. In Khalil’s case, Justice Paul Thissen wrote in an opinion, no one disputes that the woman chose to become drunk.

“If the legislature’s intended meaning is clear from the text of the statute, we apply that meaning and not what we may wish the law was or what we think the law should be,” Thissen wrote.

Khalil has been incarcerated since his sentencing in 2019. His attorney in the lower court said he expects his client to be released soon.

“When you have a 6-to-0 unanimous decision, that tells you that the courts have recognized what I was telling the district court judge all along: You cannot add your own elements to the law,” said the attorney, Will Walker. “Otherwise, nobody would ever have a fair trial.”

Khalil’s attorney in the Minnesota Supreme Court case declined to comment on the ruling.

Drunk people can’t technically be raped under N.Y. law, prosecutor says, and that should change
On the evening of the alleged assault, the woman went to a bar in Minneapolis’s Dinkytown neighborhood with a friend, but the bouncer refused to let her in because she was drunk, according to court records. That’s when Khalil and two other men allegedly approached the woman and her friend and invited them to a party.

Khalil drove the women to a house in northern Minneapolis, prosecutors allege. The friend later testified that the woman immediately lay down on the couch and fell asleep.

When the woman woke up and saw that Khalil was allegedly raping her, she told him she didn’t want to have sex, court records say.

“But you’re so hot and you turn me on,” he allegedly replied.

The woman then lost consciousness and woke up between 7 a.m. and 8 a.m. with her shorts around her ankles, she testified. She and her friend left the house in a Lyft vehicle, and the woman went to a hospital to have a rape kit done later that day. She reported the case to Minneapolis police four days later, according to court records.

Minnesota is among a majority of states that treat intoxication as a barrier to consent only if victims became drunk against their will. As of 2016, intoxication provisions in 40 states did not include situations in which someone chose to consume drugs or alcohol, according to Brooklyn Law Review.

Definitions of rape have generally been expanding in recent decades, said Jill Hasday, a professor at the University of Minnesota Law School who has written about the history of marital rape. Courts that used to require women to prove that they displayed “utmost resistance” to unwanted sexual activity now apply what Hasday characterized as a more realistic understanding of how consent typically happens.

Minnesota rape survivors, advocates and dozens of legislators see the state’s voluntary intoxication defense as a loophole that still needs to be filled. Some legislators put forth a bill in 2019 to make voluntary drunkenness grounds for a felony rape charge, but the legislature instead convened a working group to study the issue. The bipartisan bill in the Minnesota House of Representatives emerged from that group’s report on possible changes to the law.

Under the existing statute, Khalil’s case could be charged as fifth-degree criminal sexual conduct, a gross misdemeanor, according to the court ruling. State Rep. Kelly Moller (D), a co-sponsor of the bill and a prosecutor, said that charge does not go far enough.

“I’ve heard from prosecutors that even charging this as a fifth-degree gross misdemeanor is almost insulting to the victim,” she said, “because it’s such a lesser crime and it doesn’t encompass what the victim actually experienced.”

Moller said she often hears from prosecutors and victims about sexual assaults that cannot be prosecuted because the victim had chosen to consume drugs or alcohol before the attack. At a state House committee hearing in February, a woman testified that when she was raped in 2019, prosecutors told her they could not pursue her case because she had chosen to drink cocktails before she lost consciousness on the day of the attack.

Of the nearly 10 million U.S. women who have been raped while intoxicated, according to background in the court opinion, Moller said most become drunk by choice. She pointed to Khalil’s case to argue that some alleged offenders seek to prey on people in that kind of condition.

If Moller’s bill succeeds in making voluntary drunkenness grounds for a rape charge, prosecutors will still have to explore the defendant’s knowledge of the victim’s state of mind.

“The state still has to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant knew or should have known that the victim was intoxicated to the degree incapable of providing consent,” Moller said. “And that burden is high.”

Now she just needs to be forced to have the baby and the conservatives will be elated. Justice will have been served.

That is crazy. This isn't justice in any form.

Legalizing rape is appalling.

Every woman in Minnesota that has ever had a drink should file a trillion dollar class action lawsuit against the state.

That's sickening... they need to re-write that law...

Damn. I thought it would take more than one post to turn this story political vs. just looking at and agreeing about the potential ramifications of this ignorant ruling. It shouldn't be too hard to keep politics out of this and discuss it like humans.

The entire thing is disgusting politics. It’s no longer about basic humanity. They’ve made it that way.

I hope she takes it to a higher court.

It's not the ruling, it's the law. There's even a line in there that states just that. Sounds like the judges felt they needed to take a shower after passing this ruling.

I think it's a dead issue now, unfortunately. Extremely poor job by the legislature.

I guess I'll take the contrarian opinion then.. maybe not so much on this specific case as this seems to be a pretty sober guy taking advantage of woman he knew to be extremely intoxicated..

But this case aside, this issue isn't nearly as clear cut as many would like to imagine it is and this article is written from a totally biased perspective..

The whole issue revolves around consent.. if a girl has been drinking to the point where she blacks out and can't say definitively whether she gave consent or not, that's a problem legally. The law would then be placing the burden of knowing whether a woman was too drunk to give consent on the man, who has never been trained to make such a distinction and has probably also been drinking.

This article saves the real issue for the very last sentence, it spends the entire first part of the article getting people all up in their feelings, then they get to the real issue..



So the issue isn't about whether a woman voluntarily chose to have some drinks... the issue is about whether she voluntarily drank so much that she can't remember whether she gave consent or not and whether she was in a reasonable state of mind to give consent... and whether the man should be responsible for making that decision for her.

It's not about making the decision for her. It's about making the responsible decision for him. So it seems this law is written to give the man an excuse not to hold any responsibility.

"Well I'm not an expert on being drunk so how did I know?"

I'm an expert and I still don't know.

Man sober, woman passed out drunk then it's rape.
Man sober of had a few woman drunk and blackouts but did give consent... not rape.
Man and woman both drunk and black out.... well could be yes or no.

To the contrary, it's written to give both parties some measure of responsibility. If the woman is drunk and she can't really say whether she said "No" or not and there is no other real evidence to prove rape, then the burden of her proving rape is very high... as it should be.

It is to prevent a woman from going out, getting drunk, waking up somewhere she doesn't want to be next to somebody she doesn't want to be with and saying, "Oh no, I must have been raped" and then ruining a man's life.

So which person, the man or the woman, do you believe when one says she was too drunk and the other one says she was not? It seems far more that it works to question the word of the victim according to what the accused says.

What man would honestly say, "She was too drunk to know what was going on and I did it anyway"? At what point does a man have to have the responsibility to know a woman is too drunk to give consent?

If a woman is so drunk she can't remember whether or not she gave consent, the man shouldn't be having sex with her in the first place.

So it is 100% incumbent on the man to stay sober enough to make reasonable and rational decisions but the woman has no such obligation... that hardly seems equitable.

It seems as though you are using the word "equitable" to excuse a man from taking sexual advantage of a woman. I know you have decided to simply be contrary on this topic, but what would you tell your son about his responsibility in this situation?

It seems as though you think that if a man and a woman are equally drunk and have sex that it's solely on the man to know better.


No, I said that in the beginning because everybody else was whining about this horrible law.. which isn't really all that horrible. I believe everything I'm saying.


Same thing I will tell my daughter.. have some drinks, have a good time, but don't drink to the point that you lose control and blackout. Nothing good happens beyond that point.

I guess maybe were were just raised at different times. I was told to be a gentleman and never take advantage of a woman. I was taught that if I did otherwise I was wrong. I guess those rules no longer apply.

You do realize that what you're saying is that as long as a man claims he was drunk too, that lets him off the hook, right? I'm really surprised that you would try and poke fun of raising a boy the right way. Maybe that's what's wrong with this generation and why we have people making excuses for their bad behavior.

The story completely neglects the mans sobriety level, which is part of the equation as I think DC is referring.

If neither party is sober enough to make rational decisions, can you charge the man with a crime when neither party's word can be taken as accurate or verifiable.

This. The man is presented as sort of a predator in the article... I assumed what he did was wrong and he should be punished, but the debate over the law that sprung out of this article is a little different.

You do realize that's not what I'm saying at all right? I'm saying that you keep preaching from your moral soapbox about the good old days and I'm talking about the law. Nobody gets "off the hook" based on drinking but in the eyes of the law, you should get what you can PROVE. The drunker you get, the less you remember, the less you can prove.. and that goes for the boy and the girl. My single point is that just because a girl got drunk and had sex with a guy she might not otherwise have had sex with doesn't mean she was raped and it's a very precarious position to put a young man in to be responsible for making the decision, on her behalf, of whether she's too drunk to make a consenting decision or not. I thought we were getting away from men making decisions for women?


I'm really surprised that for all of your liberal leanings that you cling to this Leave It To Beaver view of morality in the world. I'm doing the best I can to raise my son to be a gentleman, I'm also doing the best I can to raise my daughter to understand she shouldn't get so drunk that she ends up passed out face down on a frat house floor.

It's 2021 my brother... girls got that WAP, they are proud of that WAP, they are going to share that WAP whenever and however they want, they are going to grind that WAP on national television, and if you don't like it, then the problem is with YOU..... and you talking to me about boys being "gentlemen".. let's address girls being "ladies" for a minute and what kind of behavior is expected from them.


Get off my lawn.

You crack me up. See, this is the wrong forum for things like "liberal leanings", but when it comes to people having things like healthcare, housing, food, the same waiting times to vote, those are what I call Christian values, not liberal values.

I raised a daughter. To hear your line of BS you sound like you're the one who wants to go back to the "good old days". You remember. "If she didn't dress half naked", "If she didn't go around shaking her ass".....

Yeah, those are the standard lines used back in the day to try and place the blame on the victim. You're just promoting a slightly different variation of it.

And what's really funny? I've seen you say that people are not being taught to take responsibility for their own actions and rationalize bad behavior. Now when someone actually agrees with that premise you're using the "get off my lawn" line? Hilarious.

Exactly. Which is why I tried to be clear in my first post that I was referring less to this case specifically and more to the general law surrounding giving consent when one or both parties have been drinking.

In this particular case, it seems like the guy was sober enough and calculating enough that he intentionally took advantage of a girl he knew to be way too drunk. I will not now, nor ever, defend that type of behavior... even if they can't prove it was rape, it's immoral and unethical as hell by my standards.

Sorry. The law is written wrong, and shouldn't be defended.

The man in this case chose to sex a passed out woman, and I kind a want to pummel him w/ deleted.

To make the argument, your 3rd paragraph of your first post in this thread makes, that argument makes me upset, same line of thinking means someone can rape someone who is asleep and claim, "ehh, I couldn't hear em say no", so it's fine? Nope! That's reprehensible.

and. imo. it's worse that dude took her home from the bar.
and if she was, noticeably drunk enough to be denied entrance to the club, and he was sober enough to ask her, "hey wanna come home with me and party" ...

We live in a pretty messed up world.

( my next thought was messed up, )

No, it's not fine. It's rape. But the law still has to prove it was rape.

And her testimony of "Well, I had a LOT to drink, last thing I remember is we were dancing, I don't remember giving consent, I don't remember saying no either, I think I blacked out, whatever happened after that I don't remember, I woke up with my underwear on the floor"

You can find the man who did that reprehensible, I would find a man who did that reprehensible.. but it doesn't exactly prove she was raped.

And I've already stated that I think the guy in this specific example is probably guilty of rape because he seems to have been fairly sober and she was beyond drunk and he took advantage of the situation...

It's sad that the court of law didn't already call for proof beyond a reasonable doubt before this law was passed. Without it, no justice was found.

It's odd how depending on the topic people will say, "We don't need more laws. We need to enforce the ones on the books". Then when it comes to other topics they say, "We need more laws".

Proof beyond a reasonable doubt has always been the standard in a court of law with or without some new legislation.

And you yourself just pointed out how the law is being abused in the case this thread was founded upon. So much for that slippery slope theory you used to refer to so often.

It's not really odd, laws have continued to evolve since the constitution was written and that will never stop. It's also not really odd that people believe in some places the existing laws would have been adequate and in other cases people believe the laws should be changed or clarified. And lastly it's not odd that the definition of "proof beyond a reasonable doubt" is one of those laws that, from time to time, might need clarified.

And every law, every single one, has the possibility of being either the starting point or the continuation, of a slippery slope toward something much worse.. and should be reviewed and considered as such. That's why I get extremely nervous when it seems the primary motivation behind a law is nothing but raw emotion over some unfortunate or catastrophic event..

Obviously, you would not be a good candidate for the Georgia or Texas legislature...

So you have been promoting a law that you yourself have shown is a slippery slope from the very start. Congratulations!

No Pit, it's a slippery slope no matter which way you go.

If alcohol is involved and you:

1. Make it easier for the woman to prove rape, then the majority of the burden/risk is on the man and he could have his life ruined over a drunk sexual encounter where he didn't really force himself on anybody.

2. Make it harder for the woman to prove rape, then the majority of the burden/risk is on the woman and she could be raped without having the rapist convicted because people were drunk and nobody's testimony is really reliable.

So, I haven't really been "promoting" any laws. I've been discussing the difficulty with making such laws and the potential unintended consequences...

Our criminal court system has always made the burden of proof, "Beyond a reasonable doubt". I don't think changing any laws will provide anything other than a loophole and new burden to meet that threshold. The laws on the books weren't making it "easier".