American Spectator
9.2.15 | Betsy
After the St. Paul’s case, they're not about to.
The St. Paul’s School rape trial should raise red flags about the rush to rewrite state laws on sexual assault. Calling a sexual interaction that went wrong “rape” when neither party used force criminalizes the inevitable misunderstandings that occur between men and women, especially young men and women exploring sex.
It’s not clear what happened between two St. Paul’s students on a June evening in 2014. The female accuser told the jury that the defendant “couldn’t know that I was uncomfortable because I was laughing,” during the encounter in the school’s equipment room. “I was trying to be cool.” But five days later, she went to the police. The male defendant said, “I thought she was having a great time.” Last week, the jury rendered a mixed verdict, acquitting him of felony rape though finding him guilty of lesser charges.
Regardless of the sentence he faces, his life has been irreversibly harmed by the rape charge and trial. Yet there will be many more trials like this, thanks to the warriors for political correctness. They have pushed to remove force as the standard for rape, and they’ve succeeded in nearly half the states already, including New Hampshire, where this trial occurred.
Sometimes, a young man will come on too strong but the young woman will go along and only later claim it was nonconsensual. In states without a standard of force, he could be convicted and sent to prison for years. In New Hampshire, had the defendant been convicted, he would have faced a mandatory 10 to 20 years.
That’s a draconian punishment for what may be mixed signals between sexual novices.
