Tagged: rape

Drunken Double Standard?

Readers of my Illustrated Guide to Law have frequently asked about a seeming double standard in criminal law when it comes to drunkenness. On the one hand, a person who is too drunk to think will be liable for crimes he commits; but on the other hand, a person who...

Q&A Roundup Part 2

I’m writing a response to an essay on “consent as a felt sense” and looking for a deeper explanation of mens rea and the reason why it ought form the basis for not just a legal system, but for the social norms of a community. I know there is some...

Dear HuffPo: Here’s why we have statutes of limitation

So we took a few minutes just now to check out some headlines with Google’s “Fast Flip” news browser (which, by the way, is super-cool). And this headline totally caught our eye: “Some Sex Crimes Get a Pass – Why?”

That’s a damn good question! What do you mean, some sex crimes don’t get prosecuted — that’s appalling! Either the crime is something society doesn’t think worth punishing, or prosecutors aren’t doing their job! So we checked it out.

What we found instead was a totally inane article on the Huffington Post, leading off with the following lines: …