In Oklahoma Forcible Oral Sex Is Not Rape If The Victim Is Drunk

Here’s the story ….

There were allegations that a 17-year-old boy assaulted a 16-year-old girl after driving her home. The two had been drinking in a park with friends and the girl was very drunk; witnesses say she had to be carried to the boy’s car and another boy, who rode in the car for a short time, recalls that she was coming in and out of consciousness.

The 17-year-old boy, who was doing the driving, took the girl to her grandmother’s house where she was found unconscious. She was taken to a hospital, where a test put her blood alcohol content above .34 — more than four times the legal limit; she awoke as hospital staff were conducting a sexual assault examination.

Tests confirmed that the young man’s DNA was found on the back of her leg and around her mouth and the boy was arrested for sexual assault. He claims the girl — the drunk, semi-conscious girl he carried to his car — consented to performing oral sex, but the girl remembers nothing after leaving the park. The boy was charged with forcible oral sodomy.

It all seems pretty clear, though there is an element of he-said-she-said but this is where it gets a little WTF …

The trial judge dismissed the case but the girl appealed the decision, and on March 24th, an appeals court ruled that prosecutors could not apply the law to a victim who was incapacitated by alcohol:

“Forcible sodomy cannot occur where a victim is so intoxicated as to be completely unconscious at the time of the sexual act of oral copulation. We will not, in order to justify prosecution of a person for an offense, enlarge a statute beyond the fair meaning of its language.”

That’s right; the appeals court said that the girl was too drunk when the boy forced his penis into her mouth but that doesn’t mean it was forcible sodomy.

Benjamin Fu, the Tulsa County district attorney says the decision is stunningly bad:

“The plain meaning of forcible oral sodomy, of using force, includes taking advantage of a victim who was too intoxicated to consent. I don’t believe that anybody, until that day, believed that the state of the law was that this kind of conduct was ambiguous, much less legal. And I don’t think the law was a loophole until the court decided it was.”

Yup, since the victim was too drunk to say ‘No,’ it’s her fault.

The boy’s attorney, Shannon McMurray, says prosecutors were clearly wrong to charge the young man with forcible sodomy, and not a lesser crime of unwanted touching … by putting his dick into the mouth of an unconscious girl:

“There was absolutely no evidence of force or him doing anything to make this girl give him oral sex, other than she was too intoxicated to consent.”

Um, let’s focus on that last statement by the boy’s attorney, a woman: She was TOO intoxicated to consent.

Now, Oklahoma does have a rape statute that protects victims who were too intoxicated to consent to vaginal or anal intercourse, but if you’re drunk, too drunk to consent or not consent, and a guy slips a dick in your mouthy in Oklahoma, it’s your fault.

You got drunk; you deserve it … at least in Oklahoma.

Raw Story

In Michigan The Senate Decides That Sodomy Will Get You Fifteen Years In Prison

Run for the hills, Michiganders! Your state Senate has passed a bill that reaffirms the state's unconstitutional law making sodomy a felony punishable by up to 15 years in prison. 

Yes, despite that pesky Supreme Court ruling back in 2003 — Lawrence v. Texas — Michigan is one of more than a dozen states that still have sodomy bans on the books. Now some of those other states’ sodomy laws specifically target gay relations, Michigan's is among those that make oral and anal sex crimes illegal regardless of whether they're same-sex or different-sex.

No matter you’re orientation, if you go down or bend over, you’re doin’ jail time, people!

But, Michigan’s sodomy ban is also intertwined with a prohibition on bestiality — kinda making the two seem like the same thing. The law makes it a felony for anyone to commit "the abominable and detestable crime against nature with mankind or with any animal."

Now, if you’ve already been convicted of a sex crime in Michigan, and then get caught sodomizing, or perhaps being sodomized, well, you’re looking at life in prison.

For the last several years, Michigan legislators have been trying to pass Logan's Law, which is designed to keep pets out of the hands of animal abusers — a law I am all for — but Senate Bill 219, by GOP … naturally… Senator Rick Jones updates language in the state's ban on bestiality and sodomy as follows: 

SB 219 passed the Senate last week with the above language intact, and is expected to be considered by the House as early as next week. 

Now, Michigan lawmakers could remove their unconstitutional ban on sodomy by simply striking out the words "either with mankind or" from SB 219 but Senator Jones says that jeopardize the whole bill. 

"The minute I cross that line and I start talking about the other stuff, I won’t even get another hearing. It’ll be done. Nobody wants to touch it. I would rather not even bring up the topic, because I know what would happen. You’d get both sides screaming and you end up with a big fight that’s not needed because it’s unconstitutional."

Jones would like to see Michigan’s outdated and stupid sodomy laws struck down, and removed from legal books, but:

"[If] you focus on it, people just go ballistic. If we could put a bill in that said anything that’s unconstitutional be removed from the legal books of Michigan, that’s probably something I could vote for, but am I going to mess up this dog bill that everybody wants? No."

So, because there are people in Michigan who are cruel to animals — and should be punished to the full extent of the law, mind you — and because legislators refuse to discuss sex, it remains illegal in the state to go downtown or to turn around and grab your ankles.

Seriously.

NCRM

Ken Cuccinelli Gets A Sodomy Smackdown From SCOTUS ... And He Probably Loved It

Ooh snap.

Last week U.S. Chief Justice John Roberts denied a request by Virginia Attorney General, the virulently anti-gay and yet same-sex obsessed, Ken Cuccinelli that a lower court ruling overturning Virginia’s sodomy law be put on hold while the Supreme Court decides whether to hear Cuccinelli’s appeal; Roberts, acting on behalf of the full court, did not issue an explanation for his denial.

It was just dee-nied.

Cuccinelli had asked the Supreme Court to put a stay on the Fourth Circuit Court’s ruling shortly after he filed a petition asking the Supreme Court to hear his appeal; SCOTUS is expected to decide later this year, or early next year, whether to hear the case, and if it decides against hearing it, the Fourth Circuit Appeals Court ruling remains in place.

And Cuccinelli gets pissy.

It all started when the Fourth Circuit overturned a felony conviction by a Virginia judge in the case of William Scott MacDonald, a 47-year-old man accused of soliciting oral sex from a 17-year-old woman. Although no sex took place, MacDonald, had been charged with soliciting someone to commit a sexual act that his attorneys argued was no longer illegal.

The Fourth Circuit Appeals Court agreed with his attorneys, ruling 3-1 that the 2003 Supreme Court decision in Lawrence v. Texas invalidated the Virginia Crimes Against Nature law as unconstitutional, thereby preventing it from being enforced.

Cuccinelli, who likes to shove his head into everyone’s sexual business because he’s obsessed with other people’s sexual activities, had argued the Lawrence decision did not apply to sexual relations between an adult and a minor—for the record, the age of consent in Virginia is 15—and he has stated in political ads for his campaign to become Virginia’s next governor, that the outdated, unconstitutional, none of your damn business, sodomy law is needed to protect children from sexual predators.

He seems to forget that there are already laws, even in Virginia, that allow for the prosecution of adults who engage in sex with minors.

Ken Cuccinelli. Same-sex sodomy obsessed gubernatorial candidate approved this message.

ALLEGEDLY.

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In Baton Rouge Consensual Gay Sex Can Still Get You Arrested

Sid Gautreaux

You know how folks make jokes about the South and how backwards it all seems? Turns out, sometimes, hell, a lot of the time, it’s true. Like this story from down in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, where it appears that the Sheriff’s Office has been conducting stings to find men willing to have consensual gay sex and then arresting them for, ahem, crimes against nature.

Now, there isn’t a hint that any money changed hands, so these crimes cannot be considered prostitution; these are men, adult men, consenting to have sex with other adult men in the privacy of one of the men’s homes. And yet, for the East Baton Rouge Sheriff’s Office, that warrants arrest after arrest; at least a dozen since 2011, with the most recent occurring about two weeks ago.

These men arrested for the crimes of consensual sex, have never been prosecuted because they have committed no crime; consensual sex between two adults, two adult males, is not a crime, even in Louisiana. But still, men are being arrested and jailed and paying fines for doing nothing wrong.  

Casey Rayborn Hicks, a spokeswoman for the Sheriff’s Office, released a statement, and she and the department clearly do not realize that they aren’t arresting criminals:

“This is a law that is currently on the Louisiana books, and the sheriff is charged with enforcing the laws passed by our Louisiana Legislature. Whether the law is valid is something for the courts to determine, but the sheriff will enforce the laws that are enacted. … The issue here is not the nature of the relationship but the location.

These are not bars. These are parks. These are family environments. Manchac Park, where the stings have largely taken place, has been known as a place where “cruising” for anonymous sex takes place, but neither talking about sex nor agreeing to sex are violations of obscenity laws.”

But the men are not having sex in the park, or in any other public place; after being propositioned by the undercover officers, the men go to their own homes, and that is where they are arrested. Apparently just having sex violates the law in Louisiana.

Except it’s not supposed to violate the law. When Lawrence v Texas—a landmark decision by the Supreme Court striking down sodomy laws in Texas, and thirteen other states, including Louisiana—then-Louisiana Attorney General Richard Ieyoub issued a statement asserting that the state’s anti-sodomy law could not be enforced, except in cases of prostitution and bestiality.

And yet, in backwards Louisiana the law stayed on the books for a sheriff, Sid Gautreaux,  who has nothing better to do than to troll parks asking men to have sex with undercover officers, to use as a weapon. And is now claiming ignorance as his excuse, with his office releasing a new statement: 

"To our knowledge, the Sheriff’s office was never contacted or told that the law was not enforceable or prosecutable."

And that lame explanation, the excuse of ignorance of the law, isn’t sitting too well with at least one Louisiana lawmaker, Baton Rouge Metro Councilman John Delgado:

“Does [Gautreaux] know that slavery is no longer around? Does he know that we have cars and no longer horse and buggies?”

Delgado is demanding apologies be issued to the 12 men who were arrested.

Gautreaux's office is now saying they will no longer enforce the out-dated law, and will work with state legislators to have it removed from the books. But that doesn’t explain the hows and whys that the sheriff’s office targeted these men, nor does it explain their strange explanation for doing so:

“The Sheriff’s Office has not, nor will it ever, set out with the intent to target or embarrass any part of our law-abiding community. Our goal is to Protect and Serve the public. When we receive calls from the public about lewd activity near our children, we have to respond. Our park operations, conducted at the specific request of the BREC Park’s Ranger, were an attempt to deter or stop lewd activity occurring in the park near children.

The deputies in the cases were acting in good faith using a statute that was still on the books of the Louisiana criminal code. The deputies used a statute that they felt fit the situation in order to remedy the concerns of the parents and park officials. The deputies presented sworn affidavits of probable cause, a set of circumstances that would lead a normal person to believe that a crime has been committed or will be committed, to judges for review. In the cases we have reviewed, the judges set bond, in effect concurring that there was probable cause for arrest. To our knowledge, the Sheriff’s office was never contacted or told that the law was not enforceable or prosecutable.

In hindsight, however, we feel we should have taken a different approach. We will consult with others in the legislative and judicial branches to see what can be done to remove this law from the criminal code that each deputy receives and to also find alternative ways to deter sexual and lewd activity from our parks.

We want to reiterate our intent in these cases. It was NEVER to target a certain segment of our population. It was only in response to parents, park officials and members of the public concerned that our parks were not safe. When we receive reports of public masturbation, sex and other lewd activity in a park where children are playing, me MUST take these concerns seriously. Our intent was honorable, our approach, however, is something we must evaluate and change.

The Sheriff’s Office is not concerned with what consenting adults do in private residences. We are concerned with what is going on in public, especially a public place frequented by children. In light of new information, we feel that we need to work with our deputies to provide them with better resources and training to deal with these issues in more appropriate ways. It is very important to us that the public understands our intent and agenda was safety and never prejudiced toward any group.”

They never intended to target gay men, they just approached gay men and asked if they wanted to have sex, went back to the man’s apartment with him, and then placed him under arrest using a law that has been declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court.

Back.Wards. And this is why the South gets a bad rap.

via Think Progress

A Boy In Norwood Colorado Is Raped And The Town Blames Him

Boys will be boys.

Last year, at the Colorado state high-school wrestling tournament, three upperclassmen from Norwood cornered a 13-year-old boy on an empty school bus, bound him with duct tape and sodomized him with a pencil. Two of the attackers were sons of Robert Harris, the wrestling coach, who was president of the school board. The victim's father was the K-12 principal.

For the boy and his family, that was only the beginning because that boy who was attacked, the victim, suddenly became the target. After his father, the school principal, reported the incident to police, the good people of Norwood forced him to resign. And fort that boy, school became hell. Students put "Go to Hell" stickers on his locker and proudly wore T-shirts that supported the perpetrators.

"Nobody would help us. We contacted everybody and nobody would help us." —The Principal, who asked not to be named to protect his son

Norwood sits high in the Rockies, a six-hour drive from Denver, and it is so small that its 300 students, from preschool through 12th grade, attend classes in a single building. The high school football team has just eight players instead of the usual 11, but the glass cases in the school's hallways show off sports trophies celebrating decades of triumphs from basketball to cheerleading.

"Pain is temporary" reads a poster on the wall. "Pride is forever." Apparently.

In 2011, Norwood won the state wrestling championship, and the following year they were back to defend their title. The team and the coaches boarded a bus to Denver for the tournament, while the principal and other school officials drove separately to cheer on the team.

The principal's wife grew up in Norwood; she met her future husband when he moved to town as a high school senior and they dated while in college. In 2000, they returned to Norwood and the boy’s father worked for the school for 10 years, first teaching computer science and auto repair, and then serving as principal for two years.

"We always thought it was a great area to raise kids. They were really happy kids, liked going to school, straight-A students."—The Principal

And their 13-year-old son was one of those kids, and he was especially good at sports. He started Pee Wee wrestling at age 3 and became a wizard  sports trivia, but in the months before the state championship, where everything changed, his mother become concerned that he was being teased at school.

In February 2012, the boy rode the bus to Denver as the team manager, in charge of videotaping the older high school students at the meet. When the coaches and wrestlers left the bus to weigh in, those three upperclassmen, those three rapists, pinned him down, bound him with the tape, pulled down his pants and assaulted him.

Right before the start of the meet, the boy’s older brother heard the rapists laughing about the assault on his brother and he told his father.

"I was shocked beyond belief, and I was mad. I do believe I was madder than I have ever been. You're trying to protect your kids, and then something like this happens."—The Principal

The father found his son, who confirmed the attack, and then he confronted Coach Harris—remember, two of Harris’ sons were involved in the assault—and Harris said nothing happened. In follow-up conversations, however, Coach Harris said, "This happens 1,000 times a day around the U.S."

The principal notified Norwood's superintendent and the school board's vice president, both of whom were in Denver. Given his personal involvement in the case, the principal agreed to step aside from any discussion of discipline and did not go to the police that night because he believed school officials would handle the incident properly.

Back in Norwood, Superintendent David Crews imposed a one-day, in-school suspension on the three rapists, and neither Crews nor the school board reported the incident to police; under Colorado law, any school official or employee who has reason to suspect a child has been abused should immediately report the matter to police or social services.

The principal complained to the school board about the punishment and, a month after the attack on his son, realizing that there would be no real punishment of the three rapists, he informed the police.

"I knew it wasn't going to be pretty. When you take on, first, a powerful family in the town—and he is also the school board president, and his kid had done something wrong—there is going to be something coming back at you."—The Principal

And while this lack of punishment was going on, that young boy would walk the halls at school while students taunted him with, 'What's been stuck up your butt today?" And, of course, these shining examples of the future took to Facebook, telling this young boy to, 'Rot in hell, liar!’

And then the students’ parents got involved.

Jennifer Long, an idiot, obviously, and a waitress at a diner in Norwood: "When I was in school there might have been bullying, but there was none of this crap about telling the school. How you going to be tough if you don't get bullied sometimes?"

Her husband, James Eilmann, who shares with his wife a lack of active brain cells, agrees: "I got bullied as a kid because I had long hair and earrings. I played football, baseball and soccer and the older kids bullied me. But we always shook hands and it would be over with. But today, you can get prosecuted. It has all gone too far."

I guess James Eilmann would have just been raped by three older boys and kept his mouth shut.

Frustrated by the 'protect-the-rapists' attitude of the town, and the lack of interest by school officials, the principal finally reported the incident to the Denver police. The police sent investigators to Norwood and on April 23 they arrested the three boys, charging them as juveniles with kidnapping, sexual assault and false imprisonment.

On news of the arrests, the town went crazy; oh not because three rapists had been arrested, but because three wrestlers, who’d brought home a trophy for those glass cases, had been arrested. The parents demanded the school board dismiss the principal.

"It should have been left alone. It should have been handled through the system here. If you publicize it, it gets blown out of proportion."—Sheldon Cline, a 54-year-old electrician.

Makes one wonder how Cline would have handled his son, or, god forbid, his daughter, being raped on a school bus.

But one person, Marie Fouche, a substitute teacher, defended the principal at the school board meetings: "It seemed the whole town was against the victim and his father. It was all about punishment and not helping."

Helping. Like the way Jessica Bicknase helped. See, after the arrests, she was identified as the mother of one of the accused, so she paid to print T-shirts that bore a slogan using the initials of the suspects. A dozen students wore the Bicknase T-shirts to school and someone posted a sign with the same wording on the locker of the victim's brother. These students told police they wanted to support their friends, the rapists.

Jessica Bicknase declined to comment. She should have declined to be a mother all those years ago if this kind of behavior from her own child is somehow acceptable to her.

Police officers, after speaking to those students, went to their parents to warn them against intimidating the 13-year- old; the parents demanded to know what the police would be doing about the victim’s father, you know, since he started all this.

After the T-shirt incident, the principal decided to stop sending his son to school, and instead brought his assignments home: "My son was the outcast. He was made to feel like he was the one who caused the whole thing."

Late last year, one of the accused pleaded guilty to sexual contact without consent; the other two pleaded guilty to third-degree assault. They each received varied sentences that included probation, community service and restitution of about $2,500 apiece. For raping a young boy.

The principal's contract was up for renewal and after extensive negotiations involving lawyers from both sides, the board renewed his contract, but put him on paid leave while it reached a settlement. He has decided to take another job, at another school for half the pay, some two hundred miles away.

Coach Harris was reappointed Norwood's wrestling coach, though he was given a letter of reprimand for leaving students unsupervised on the bus.

The principal's son, now 14, is doing better at his new school. He joined the wrestling team and just finished an undefeated season. He's now starting to play football and do weightlifting.

"Maybe it was a wake-up call to get our kids out of that kind of community where people behave that way."—The boy’s mother.

Boys will be boys.

Taunting and teasing and bullying; we’ve become inundated with stories of students being teased and bullied, sometimes to death, by their fellow students, and we say we won’t stand for it.

In Norwood, Colorado, though, the parents not only believe that bullying is some sort of character building movement, they believe that a boy who has been raped by three older boys is not a victim, but a criminal.

How lovely.

A few stats on hazing:

• More than 40 high school boys were sodomized with foreign objects by their teammates in over a dozen alleged incidents reported in the past year, compared with about three incidents a decade ago.
• Boys were raped with a broken flagpole outside Los Angeles
• Boys were raped with a metal concrete-reinforcing bar in Fontana, California
• Boys were raped with a jump-rope handle in Greenfield, Iowa
• Boys were raped with a water bottle in Hardin, Missouri
• 4,000 sexual assaults occur each year inside U.S. public schools, as well as 800 rapes or attempted rapes
• At New York's elite Bronx High School of Science, three teenage track-team members were arrested after a freshman teammate alleged they repeatedly hazed him, holding him down and sodomizing him with their fingers.
• In at least four cases of sodomy hazing last year, the coach or supervising teacher was alleged to have known about it, ordered it, witnessed it or laughed about it, according to police reports and court filings.
• At Maine West High School in Des Plaines, Illinois, varsity soccer players allegedly "rewarded" new teammates by holding them down and sodomizing them with sticks and their fingers, while coaches did nothing to intervene, according to court documents and police reports. After witnessing an attack on a 16-year-old in July, varsity coach Michael DiVincenzo allegedly congratulated the victim and asked him "if it was all good." During a freshman drill, he was alleged to have told players they would be sodomized by the varsity team if they failed to communicate effectively, according to a police report. DiVincenzo was arrested last month on misdemeanor charges of hazing, battery and failure to report child abuse. The Maine West school board voted to fire DiVincenzo.

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