The Glade 4.0

I was actually thinking about this the other day. The answer to Talya's question seems to actually be, "yes". Drunk drivers that kill can often be charged with involuntary manslaughter, vehicular manslaughter, criminally negligent homicide, etc. depending on jurisdiction.

Would it then be possible to actually commit premeditated murder while drunk and then build a defense around pleading down to such a lesser charge where circumstantial evidence for malice or intent are weak or absent, by design?

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"It's real, grew up in trife life, the times of white lines
The hype vice, murderous nighttimes and knife fights invite crimes" - Nasir Jones

The point that Talya was driving at is that intoxicated persons are still held legally accountable for their actions in a court of law. A drunk driver is charged with a crime. That crime is not murder, but it is a crime. Just driving the car while intoxicated is a crime, even if you hurt no one. A man who beats his wife does not get off of the assault charges by claiming intoxication, and in fact, evidence that he was intoxicated at the time is quite damning when brought before judge and jury. The legal precedent in the United States is that you are very much responsible for your actions while intoxicated. Unless you have sex. Then you're a rape victim, because you're suddenly not in control of your actions.

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Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

That's only half true. A woman is not responsible, but a man is a rapist.

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you know... if it were not for drunken sex, I suspect that about 10% less babies would actually be conceived.

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Darksiege
Traveller, Calé, Whisperer
Lead me not into temptation; for I know a shortcut

Fewer.

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Holy shitsnacks!

That's not quite how it works. If the man is not a rapist, the woman certainly is guilty.....of being a slut. That gives the woman a pretty big incentive to cry rape whenever she can get away with it.

We live in a culture that basically assumes that upstanding women have no physical sex drive whatsoever and only desire sex as an emotional consequence of being in love with (or believing they are in love with) a man. A woman that wants to have sex with a guy that she doesn't feel an emotional attachment to (whether it is for pleasure or for money) is a serious deviant, kind of like gay people. The US has no small number of people that actually believe that rape can't result in pregnancy because in the absence of the emotional attachment a normal woman's body will physically reject becoming pregnant. Some of these people get elected as Senators.

This means that if sex happened and there's any question of consent, the guy must have done something to coerce the woman. She met him 3 hours ago while drunk, she obviously doesn't love him which means she obviously doesn't want sex from him. This isn't a feminist power grab. This is how its always been in Western culture, today we just don't require a marriage contract to "prove" the two are in love before sex becomes OK.

The guy isn't always at fault when it comes to these things either. If you hire a low class druggie hooker, you are a borderline rapist for using her circumstances to force her into sex. On the other hand, if you hire a high class hooker that is rich from selling sex, you are the victim, not her. Now, our culture is perfectly fine with using severe economic coercion to get people to do basically anything else, but not sex. No, the vagina's purity is more important than the wants and needs of the woman it's attached to. If you are a landlord with a female tenant that's not paying rent and you offer to cancel her debt in exchange for sex, you are the scum of the universe. Now, you can kick her onto the cold street and leave her homeless in wintertime. That's perfectly OK. But offer a third option that let's her keep a roof over her head? You're a scumbag for offering, and she's an immoral deviant for accepting.

That's true for criminal liability, but not really for contract validity, which is a much closer parallel to the mutual consent standard for sex. If a person can show that they were sufficiently intoxicated to lack the requisite mental capacity at the time they entered into a contract and, in the case of voluntary intoxication, the other party knew it and took advantage of it, that contract can be voided. In short, if some guy at a party is clearly trashed, and you take the "opportunity" to convince him to sell you his car, the courts may void that contract. If he's also protesting at the time that he doesn't want to sign but you keep pressuring him, physically sit him in a chair, and repeatedly put the pen in his hand and guide it to the document until he finally gives in and reluctantly signs while drifting in and out of coherence...yeah, good luck convincing anyone that's a valid contract reflecting true mutual agreement.

It could be less. We'd have to weigh all the babies and categorize them by their mothers' alcohol preferences.

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Which itself is a straw man of the typical campus scenario. Generally, both parties are intoxicated and there's not a clear-cut scenario of one pressuring the other. Sometimes there is, and feminists would have us believe that's the norm - but it isn't.

What actually happens is that, because males are expected to initiate romantic and sexual activity most of the time, the male does so, the female responds favorably to the initial overture (which generally does not consist of "Hi there, my name is Chad, are you interested in sex tonight?"), everyone else is partying and not chaperoning these 2 adults... and then we have a rape allegation by her and him claiming it was consensual, and not a lot in the way of actual evidence one way or the other.

If you're going with the car analogy, it's as if two people get drunk at a party, start bantering about one selling the other a car, and the next day one has a car and the other has a wad of money and neither is entirely sure how the transaction happened - nor is there any document (i.e. physical evidence) because they did it as a drunken lark at a party.

With sex, though, feminists want to turn the male initiation and attempts to obtain consent into "pressure". That's fine when there is evidence of actual pressure, but normal social mores do not mean that any time a male start putting the moves on a female that pressure was involved just because she had something to drink - nor does pressure necessarily mean she couldn't or didn't consent. The degree and nature of pressure matter a lot - as does the question of whether she would have done it anyhow.

We are talking about people going to prison, not just returning a car and some money. We should not be sending people to prison based on ideas of civil law equity.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

This is a pretty outdated idea of how society views female sexuality. This wasn't even current when I was in middle school, and that was over 25 years ago now.

There are some people that still think this, but for the most part "slut" is an appellation individuals give to individual women when they have a problem with them.

Moreover, men have always had negative appelations for promiscuity too, such as "womanizer" and sometimes even "slut" too. Lately though, the appellations have gone to more of simply implying he must be a rapist.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Last I checked, a woman being labeled a slut did not come with a jail sentence.

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Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

No, it doesn't, but like some other smart guy said, people respond to incentives. When women can get out of the "slut" label by crying rape and there are basically no consequences for being caught lying, they're going to do it. I'm pretty convinced that most of the fake rape accusations in college aren't from vindictive women trying to **** over a guy for dumping them, but from the ones whose parents found out what they were doing in college and now they need an excuse to not get labeled a slut by them.

Very few people will label their own child a slut, or really be that unforgiving of their mistakes- even sexual mistakes. when you have your own children, you'll understand this better. You seem to imagine that there are large numbers of parents out there living in absolute terror that their daughter will eventually have sex, but the fact is that even highly conservative parents were young once and made their own mistakes and are generally at least somewhat realistic about these things. Young people always think their parents don't understand, or never had the issues they did, or whatever, but for the most part parents have in some form or other been there too, and know what it's like to be young and discovering adulthood.

The people most likely to label a girl a slut are her own social rivals, and they generally will not do so based on any sort of criteria - the same behavior on their own part or one of their friends is not "slutty" in their minds. It's like any other social drama among young people. This is also why women, especially younger ones, will play hard-to-get or say no when they mean yes to get the guy to talk them into it - that way they can tell themselves they aren't a slut because a "slut" hops right into bed with a guy with no compunctions. Not me, though! I'm not slutty, I have standards! I have to be talked into it, and have a few drinks in me, and I only do it with hot guys!

Well, that would be fine if it were just a matter of young adults engaging in the back-and-forth of mating, but unfortunately we've got a large crowd of feminists who feel that they should have their social maneuvering validated by the judicial system. We've gotten into this because of the endless worry about what's "good for rape victims" and "good for rape reporting" and not "blaming the victim" or "calling her a liar".

Somehow, feminists have constructed this standard where calling any rape claim into question calls them all into question, and therefore they must all be treated as accurate.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Clearly.



That you aren't charge with murder was my point. Being charged differently is the analog to this silly notion diminished capacity to consent. One could easily murder someone (in the definition of the word, as in premeditated intent) but do so while drunk and be found guilty of negligent homicide just as a person could claim rape when making a conscious choice to have sex and then claiming rape under the guise of diminished consent.

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"It's real, grew up in trife life, the times of white lines
The hype vice, murderous nighttimes and knife fights invite crimes" - Nasir Jones

If you kill someone while drunk driving, it's still an accident and hence not murder. If you get drunk, get pissed off and go shoot someone, that's murder because it is clearly not an accident.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Who said anything about shooting anyone?

If you kill someone when you're driving drunk and meant to do it, will you be charged with murder or manslaughter/negligent homicide?

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"It's real, grew up in trife life, the times of white lines
The hype vice, murderous nighttimes and knife fights invite crimes" - Nasir Jones

Maybe, maybe not. If the DA can show the conditions required for murder three or one. That being malicious intent (Got drunk had a fight with someone ran them over.) or premeditation. Planned to kill someone in advanced tried to use DUI to avoid a proper murder charge.

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I prefer to think of them as "Fighting evil in another dimension"

The fact that you are charged differently is an extension of first vs. second degree murder. The law accounts for the fact that you may not have intended to kill someone, but you are still responsible and therefore charged with a crime. That you did not intend to cause a death does not relieve you of the responsibility for doing so. Furthermore, had you been sober while involved in the exact same automobile accident, you likely would not be charged with manslaughter. It's not a foregone conclusion, sober drivers can and do get charged with manslaughter, but being intoxicated seals the deal. There is no diminished capacity. You aren't being charged with a lesser sentence because you were intoxicated. You are being charged with manslaughter when we would have otherwise considered it a tragic accident. You are receiving a harsher penalty due to your intoxication.

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Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

Me. I said something about shooting someone.

You're correct about drunken driving, but it doesn't really apply because deaths due to that are accidental. Rape is not accidental. Neither is it accidental when you shoot someone.

An even better example is if you get drunk, get in a fight with another drunk, and lose. You can't claim that your drunkenness is a mitigating factor for you but his is an aggravating factor for him because you lost and he won.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

In some states (Ohio for example) if you are at fault for an accident but were not intoxicated, and someone died, you could be charged with Vehicular Manslaughter (if I recall the name of the charge right).

Vehicular Manslaughter is not even a felony. It's actually a misdemeanor in Ohio one degree lower than either drunk driving even without an accident.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Except I am suggesting a scenario wherein the driver, intoxicated or not, does intend to kill his victim.

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"It's real, grew up in trife life, the times of white lines
The hype vice, murderous nighttimes and knife fights invite crimes" - Nasir Jones

I'm suggesting a scenario where in someone premeditates murder by vehicle and does so drunk, not a drunk driving accidentally running someone over/causing an accident.

The drunk fight example is analogous to rape in the situation of this so-called diminished capacity, except it's assumed (at least it seems so examining the way rape is prosecuted, especially campus rape) that the female is always the "loser" of the fight.

You might not be able to shoot someone accidentally under most circumstances, but you could very well (physically) construct a scenario where it appears as though you did.

Forensics can more easily determine if a constructed shooting or drunk driving accident was actually premeditated than if a drunk person consented to sex or not. Therefore, no one ever attempts this as it's fantasy of Mission Impossible scale. But the same logic applied to rape, that a drunk person is incapable of making regrettable but conscious decisions is ludicrous when applied to murder. Imagine if such forensics weren't possible - or rather imagine it did exist for determining consent. Would we simply charge drunk drivers with manslaughter and not investigate the possibility of murder the same way we don't consider the possibility of a drunk person consenting to sex?

What's more troubling, is if such psychological forensics does come to exist. In cases of so-called diminished consent rape, we (society) can't even suggest looking at physical evidence, evidence which may not be as as convincing at discriminating drunk driving and shooting accidents from instances of actual murder, without being labeled as sexist and even mysoginistic.

It's as though subjecting every crime to the same burden of proof is the ideal, but offensive in cases of rape.

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"It's real, grew up in trife life, the times of white lines
The hype vice, murderous nighttimes and knife fights invite crimes" - Nasir Jones

No, it's not as though that is the case, that is the case.

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I actually didn't assume that, but society does. In any case, it's the only way to make the analogy work; the consent issues make analogies to other crimes very difficult.



You don't need to; firearms accidents are not unheard of.



One of the problems with rape is that the victim can refuse to provide the forensic evidence, which itself is another problem. We would probably call that tampering with evidence in any other case.



Society as a whole seems to be fine with looking at the evidence, even if they jump to conclusions before doing so. The problem is that society is getting shouted down by a vocal but sizeable minority that is offended by this.

Part of the problem actually is the public and press insistence on "knowing" beforehand. People get all offended at the idea that it might not be appropriate for criminal allegations to be made public during investigation, but then as soon as they get the sparsest facts they jump to conclusions. Then, when more facts come out they act all shocked. This isn't just in rape cases, either, but it's especially a thing in rape cases.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

When I mean looking at the evidence, I mean it being used in any investigation and as evidence in arraignment and/or trial or precluded from being used thusly as a direct result law of the lobbying of advocacy groups.

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"It's real, grew up in trife life, the times of white lines
The hype vice, murderous nighttimes and knife fights invite crimes" - Nasir Jones