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I guess it's sex crimes week on The Motte. Here is one I've been puzzling about.
How on Earth was Danny Masterson actually convicted?
This has been a slow boil for me. I'd seen headlines here and there about the slow rolling case against him. I totally missed when the first trial went to a hung jury. Then suddenly I see he was convicted on 2 out of 3 rape charges and sentenced to 30 years. Even saw some headlines about Ashton Kutcher and Mila Kunis getting dragged for writing a character witness letter for his sentencing. But something jumped out at me.
He was being prosecuted for crimes 17-19 years old at the time the prosecution started. Red flag number one, I don't know the specific law in CA, but surely that's pushing the statute of limitations, right? Indeed it is! Statute of Limitations for rape is 10 years. So how did they still prosecute him?
Well there are a few exceptions.. Namely
What appears to have sunk Masterson's SOL is that there are multiple accusers. Now reading the law myself, the reading seems clear to me. The exception requires a seperate conviction. But I'm no lawyer or judge, obviously.
Or
And I believe this is the part pertaining to SOL
So I donno, maybe it's not as clear cut as I think. I repeat, not a lawyer.
Moving past the SOL concerns I have, what was the evidence against Masterson? Near as I can tell none. There were 3 victim testimonies, some expert testimony, and that was it. Zero evidence corroborating the witnesses, zero physical evidence, zero circumstantial evidence. And this is why SOL is so important. It's not a get out of jail free card. It exists so the defense can practically gather some evidence to exonerate their client. After 20 years, most physical evidence will be gone, alibis will be impossible, witnesses will be difficult to find and their testimony will be even more unreliable than already notoriously unreliable witness testimony. All we're left with is he said/she said, and the biases of the jury pool.
This was an idle, principled frustration for me. I honestly could give a shit about Danny Masterson. However, now that figures more politically salient, like Russell Brand, are in the crosshairs, the precedent set by Masterson's chilling conviction are all the more frightening.
There is a second reason for SOL besides fuzzy memories.
I’m not the same person I was 20 years ago. Honestly I’m relatively stupid compared to that person. But biologically it’s not anything close to the same molecules. I have different experiences. I’ve grown and in some ways gotten worse as a person. To prosecute someone for crimes they did 20 years ago is literally punishing a completely different person.
Maybe he did rape these people. His 20 something self deserved the punishment.
The problem with this argument in this case, as in my conversation with Walter below, is that Masterson doesn't admit his sins and offers no evidence of change.
The first step in the argument that "Well I'm a different person now..." is to say "Yeah, wow, can't believe I did that when I was younger, I'm horrified I did that, I'd never do that now!" Masterson has not offered anything like that. If he did, there's a good chance it would mitigate his sentence significantly.
Hell, I never raped anyone, and I can think of a dozen times I did something ten years ago that horrifies me today. I'm horrified at how I treated my girlfriends at 18, hell at how I treated my friends.
But I do see your point, inasmuch as the thirty year sentence is life-ending. Which is why I think we need to bring back punishments like public horse-whippings or locking men in the stockade in the middle of Los Angeles for a day and a night. A basic sense of justice rejects the idea that 40 year old criminal gets to walk free unpunished a public symbol that you can commit crimes and get away with it, a basic sense of justice rejects the idea of locking him away for the rest of his life at the taxpayer's expense. But seeing him publicly degraded, beaten? That satisfies all. It won't ruin his life or the lives of others, it will satisfy the victims that justice has been done. It will be a permanent embarrassing stain on his life.
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Eh, I'm less persuaded by that argument. It's just a bit too galaxy brained for me. A bit too "The Ship of Theseus has a definite answer". And presenting evidence that you've grown and changed and regret who you once were could be presented at sentencing.
I mean, that is an area probably ripe for some sort of codified reform. Sentencing is notoriously all over the place.
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The obvious answer is religious prejudice against Scientology. Which may be justified and I may share, but it's still how this conviction was reached.
Among other things one of the women testified that her own mother (!) told her that while what happened was tragic she shouldn't report it because of the damage it would do to the faith. After the woman accused Masterson, her mother cut off all contact with her.
The jury was persuaded by a lot of testimony about the weird cult the perp was in, the way Scientologist hierarchs pressured victims not to go public at the time, the testimony about consequences women faced from the Scientologist community for going public. The jury found all that persuasive.
This is as much a MeToo case as it was a religious persecution/cult case depending on your view of scientology. There's precedent for overruling the SoL in cases of religious pressure to hide accusations... But I find the urge to eliminate procedural protections for rapists deeply fascist. We've already seen these laws used against Assange. Give the state infinite power to prosecute its enemies when accused of sex crimes and all the state needs is a woman, who can hide behind rape shield laws anyway. The urge to prosecute minority religions should be viewed similarly, even if scientology really is nutso.
Aside from this, lol@ everyone involved in the Ashton Kutcher Mila Kunis imbroglio resulting from their letter trying to offer mitigating character evidence for Masterson. They tried to write letters about what a nice guy he was, but failed to realize A) the letters would be public record, B) it's generally better to admit he did it in that kind of letter. The classic format is "I can't reconcile what he's been convicted of with the man I knew..." They failed to include that, indicating they still think he's innocent. They then issued a mealy mouthed half apology to the victims, victims they don't believe are victims. If you want to stand by your friend, regardless of circumstances I think that's admirable, but say it out loud standing up straight. He did it or he didn't. If you think he didn't there are no victims to retraumatize.
This is the part that's very weird to me, where they seem stuck in some sort of Schrödinger's Rapist situation, where if he did it then it's very bad and they feel for the victims, but if he didn't then they have his back. Any situation is bound to have some uncertainty, but you can't live in both worlds, where you feel bad for the alleged victims, but also want to write your letter for the accused as though he's innocent. They certainly can do what you suggest and simply use "I can't reconcile blahblahblah" or they can say he did it, but that he still has redeeming qualities. But this notion that you feel bad for someone that you don't think was victimized is weird. If my best friend was accused of rape, but told me he didn't do it, and there wasn't any physical evidence, I wouldn't move even the slightest fucking bit off of, "she is a vile liar and I have his back 100%". In a character letter, I would write whatever I think would help him the most, but I would never even have the slightest inclination that I should apologize to the liar for any pain I caused.
I suppose this is just the product of sincerely internalizing "believe victims" while battling with the cognitive dissonance that you're pretty sure this one is actually lying.
Of course you can. One obvious scenario would be if some dirtbag looked kind of like Hyde (it helps that the character kind of looks like a dirtbag), and got close to several women by convincing them he was famous. Then he raped them. This presents us with a situation where Danny Masterson is completely innocent, and yet leave the women with the internal experience of having been raped by Danny Masterson.
I'm not saying the above happened, or that I even believe the above happened. But it's a very easy position to take if you want to defend your friend and you're also a celebrity that needs to be careful not to get torn apart by the me too crowd. You just start the letter like: "I feel for these women, and I believe their trauma is real, but this has to be a case of mistaken identity because {insert character witness and trauma memory formation points here}"
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I don't think it's the product of anything sincere. It's the product of fear and cowardice, of wanting to mouth the socially appropriate lies when it isn't your ox being gored. I'd even posit a third darker view: they think/know he did in fact do the things he was accused of (Masterson was, after all, a man who DJed under the alias DJ Donkey Punch and was disciplined for on set behavior in the past) but don't think it was a "real" crime. That brandishing a gun at a woman after sex is normal behavior or that the Church was justified to poison the accuser's dogs because Scientologists gotta stick together.
I think this is another needle you can thread rhetorically and philosophically quite deftly. It's perfectly possible for the sex to have been bad, even traumatizingly bad, for her without him committing any crimes. I can feel bad for her that she thinks she experienced something unfortunate, even though she wasn't the victim of a crime.
But this isn't what the Kutchers did. They flailed about aimlessly managing to look both guilty and wrong at the same time. Just goes to show in any controversy DADD: Don't Apologize Double Down.
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Paging @2rafa, but I share a similar meta-hurdle with her that prevents me from getting too worked up about these cases, or at least tempers my emotional reaction to this kind of injustice.
I can objectively agree with you about the apparent stretching of judicial reasonability, the fear of impossible to defend against, the growing assumption of guilt until proven innocent, and the clear threat of these ideological kangaroocifixions creeping into other aspects of crime-and-justice that might actually threaten me. And I can agree about the campus-rape crisis from a few years back, and more recently Me-Too, etc.
Nothing that follows, dismisses the abstract principled disagreement with these judicial outcomes.
However, I can only laugh at the ideological blindspot from the 'liberal' crowd at these kinds of outrage-at-sex-scandal-outrage. The Motte is the same population, intimately familiar with the I never thought the leopard would eat my face meme, no?
These solution here is not to hook-up, not to have causal sex, not to get drunk and fuck people you're not married to. This is all a bunch of liberals pissed that we couldn't stop the ride somewhere between 1/2 and 9/10ths down the slope. Boo-hoo.
Maybe the progressive's impulse that there's something wrong with a lecherous 31 year old celebrity fucking a 16 year old, their inclination to beleive the legitimacy of her later feelings that she was prey-on and harmed, or their belief that going to a party and fucking drunk people, whether or not you are drunk is an excerise in poor judgement, aren't wrong. Maybe the progressive's judicial response is warped and fucked up, but maybe it's because the people who came before them tore down all the scaffolding and vandalized all the blueprints for a functional paradigm, and those same people are all outraged that those who came after aren't happy standing exposed shivering in the wreckage and be told all about their fReEdOm.
From where I stand, everything MeToo is people trying to put a roof back over their head, while the same people who tore down their original house criticise them for not enjoying the fresh air, and the people who built the original house are too busy tell them they're rebuilding it wrong, instead of telling the wreckers to fuck off.
Are you saying we shouldn't get too upset about an innocent man going to prison for thirty years because he didn't follow, what are now quite rare, sexual norms that you think are better?
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https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12530981/Russell-Brands-management-told-wasnt-good-look-date-16-year-old-girl-told-pretend-goddaughter-niece-alleged-accuser-Alice-claims.html
That article is quite something!
I feel for her I do, she was used by him and a 30 year old runs circles in mind game powers around a 16 year old, but I don’t simply understand her logic. „Brand was sleazy, and I hated it, so I chose other sleazy guys“? If she chose bad boys in her life so far, she has a type and he was just the first.
No dad expressing deep concerns or simply beating Brand up? The only fatherly person is a random taxi driver. This is just sad.
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There's no point in that. The ruins of the demolished walls and foundation are already overgrown with weeds, and the wreckers are long dead and forgotten. And the house was built from materials that no longer exist.
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But there is another solution - desacralization of sex and all the things that it entails. There was some movement in that direction with Sexual revolution but it stopped at current feminist puritanism. Without psychological significance given to it by ourselfs rape is no worse than being beaten up.
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Eh, I don't find this argument persuasive. I highly doubt the vast majority of supporters of the MeToo movement would be caught dead agreeing with any sort of 'sex negativity.' It's really about women wanting to have their cake and eat it to.
The way these sexual assault and rape proceedings are going, we are hurtling towards a world where young women get to become intoxicated at parties and fuck around as much as they want. But then if a man they slept with (or presumably could've slept with) ever does something they don't like, they can bring the full force of the law against them. Even 20 years later.
Yes conservative courting norms and laws were created to prevent this exact thing, but I'm not sure most mainstream progressives are able to think of anything labeled 'conservative' in a positive light. It's quite strange but the modern media landscape really has made a world where people see a group labeled 'enemy' enough times and they get to a point where they just literally cannot fathom that that group has anything beneficial going on.
The point is that MeToo represents an organic rebellion by a lot of women against the excesses of the sexual revolution, whether they consciously realise it or not (and most, as you suggest, do not). Is it often misguided, does it often harm innocents, does it broadly fail to present viable alternatives, is it still trapped inside liberal ideology? Of course - it represents a dynamic rage, it is largely impotent, those supporting it have little understanding of the real material causes of their suffering.
But, as @iprayiam3 says, that does not mean it is insincere. And so-called conservatives who spend their time defending lotharios and cads are essentially liberals on this issue, no different to those defending ‘drag queen story hour’ or teenage transition. No, some things are bad. Young women raised in a climate of total sexual liberalism are rebelling with the only words they have, in the only way they can. They’re not going to become “trad” overnight, they have no understanding of what that is, they were raised without religion, they are surrounded by a media environment that means they don’t have any real understanding of what reversing it would mean. Still, they know the present situation is untenable.
Just how deep does that lack of understanding run? Do these women actually still not realize that trying to outdo one another in pandering to the short-term sexual proclivities of the top 5% of men will never get them the one thing they really crave, which is the attention and devotion of a worthy man?
Hah, I continue to find it fascinating how so many folks in the Motte/rationalist sphere underestimate the intelligence of the average person, or hell even the above average person.
The people that are capable of having conversations like these on sensitive topics without foaming at the mouth rabidly are a few percentage points, at most.
Lord, selection effects are terrifyingly powerful things.
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They can't get what they want by any means, because there aren't nearly enough "worthy" men by their own standards. Feminists will of course argue this is due to the degeneracy of men, but since this isn't the case, winning that argument doesn't gain them anything.
There aren't nearly enough worthy women either. I'd say the mating marketplace is in balance in that sense.
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You don't think men have degenerated? Why not?
You see the cohorts of NEETs and don't think that means degeneration? I'm surprised at this coming from you Nybbler.
There aren't that many NEETs, they're just horrendously overrepresented on places like Reddit. They used to just commit minor crimes and/or hang out somewhere and smoke weed.
Interesting. I know several in my personal life. I don't know the stats off the top of my head, but it seems to me that the modal young man in America is far less outgoing and just generally capable than in the last few generations.
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Have you met people of average intelligence, let alone the half who fall below the midpoint? The people we most often make fun of here are midwits already in the 90th+ percentile. Expecting average people, especially average young people, to accurately diagnose the complexities of the sexual marketplace is overambitious. They may be aware of their place relative to others, but their collective role in the machine isn’t going to be derived by the average 17 year old.
And in any case, there’s a defection issue here. The average 18 year old boy in modern secular France (for example) isn’t going to wait until marriage to have sex. A girl his age has no power over him, if she tells him she wants to wait, he’ll go fuck someone else who has not fully considered the reality of gender relations and concluded that promiscuity is counterproductive for women. She is left with two choices if she commits to this path. First, she could become a tradcath (or maybe Muslim), which presumably as say a secular Parisian (maybe not even of Catholic background) would involve abandoning the culture in which she was raised and wholesale LARPing to join a completely different largely rural subculture and belief system that will be suspicious of a young single person without a family history in the SSPX or whatever. Secondly, she could find a secular French boy so romantically unsuccessful or unconfident that he is willing to agree to the terms despite living in a promiscuous society. Of course, that young man is likely so shy that he’ll never even make a move, and may otherwise be extremely awkward, stunted or ugly (by which I don’t mean “not the top 5%”, but “in the bottom 10%”).
So in reality, the girl usually has to put out if she wants a relationship [that may lead to marriage] with an average young man in her league of class/education/looks.
I appreciate you always giving a rigorous defense of women when these sexual marketplace topics get brought up. I may not always agree, but it's a needed service! I rarely see these arguments being made anywhere, unfortunately.
Don't you think the argument that the average 18-yr-old girl in modern secular France has no power over the average boy his age is so obviously far-fetched that it basically belongs to fantasy land?
I'd say @2rafa was arguing that she doesn't have power over the situation. Yes a girl has some power over the average boy, but not enough power to get him to commit to her if she won't put out.
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I mean, yes, within the narrow window of said average girl asking said average boy to not have sex. All the power such a girl has over such a boy is because she gatekeeps sex. He'll move heaven and earth if he thinks he has a shot. If the singular ask of that girl is to not do the one thing he'll do anything to do... yeah, she has no power over that.
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Hold up. These are completely different scenarios. Why did you just move the goalposts?
I’m saying that defection from modern sexual culture isn’t a viable solution for most young women in the West even if they thought of it, which they probably wouldn’t. How is that not relevant?
They’re not pandering to the “top 5%” but to the average young man their age, who grew up in the same post-sexual-revolution culture and so is not usually going to accept a single young woman telling him to wait for her.
Again, hold up.
You and @iprayiam3 are specifically discussing the reactions of women supposedly used and abused by Danny Masterson and Russell Brand and, I presume, similar male celebrities and lotharios, i.e. the top 5% of men, not by average young man their age. You're claiming this is the understandable and sincere female reaction to the undesired consequences of the sexual revolution.
In your comment above, you seem to be implying that a modern Western woman putting out in the framework of a long-term relationship on the path to marriage is somehow also an example of promiscuity. I think even on this forum most people would find that interpretation highly dubious.
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I can agree with this point, that broadly the MeToo movement exists due to sexual excesses of the sexual revolution. I can even agree that it's due to rage. But I still find it extremely troubling. I suppose it depends on where you see society heading due to the current proceedings.
I absolutely disagree with this characterization. It has long been a staple of archetypal stories that heroic men with high status can sleep around with pretty much whoever they want, get applauded for it, and fail to have any consequences. It was even common in Christian societies, although the Catholics did tend to have a dimmer view of lotharios. They were anomalous in quite a few respects. (Nowadays they've lost their distinctness because their peculiar outlook has become the mainstream view, imo)
Now I still think that heroes sleeping around with virgins all across society can be bad, unless you have very few heroes who unambiguously do good things. These frail half-men 'pseuds' we have nowadays that have usurped the place and status the hero used to occupy are far from any sort of moral ideal, however.
If a man truly does beat back the chaotic flood, saves society, and pushes us forward into a golden age - he can sleep around as much as he wants, as far as I'm concerned. If Elon Musk wants to sow his wild oats, well, I don't see much wrong with that.
But the Russell Brands of the world are one of the most telling signs that the way our society doles out status is sick. Absolutely rotten.
With your daughter?
…Yes? Perhaps I’d feel different if I actually had a daughter and had watched her grow up, but this doesn’t feel like that big of a dilemma. If you don’t want Elon Musk solving the fertility crisis with your daughter, then you don’t want to win. Your reproductive fitness incentives are aligned with hers.
Now, with my wife/gf? Absolutely not. He can get fucked
I don’t think the opposition in this hypothetical case is to Elon Musk being your son in law and father of your grandchild(ren), it’s to Elon Musk using your daughter as a whore, which is what @TheDag seemed to imply was acceptable to him.
I'll preface this with the fact that I don't have any children either. I'm sure that would affect things.
That being said, from an objective standpoint I think that I could stomach a suitable hero (i.e. Elon Musk) coupling with my daughter if the right story were told about it. If he launched the first rocket into orbit that prevented his company from bankruptcy, and my daughter was at the afterparty, and one thing led to another, et cetera...
This poor rendition of a hero's journey highlights the problem we have in modern times. Even the most credulous and serious depiction of a hero's journey struggles to recapture the gravitas of a story told over a campfire many nights between a group of individuals that have known each other most of their lives. We humans were built to tell stories around campfires, that's where so much of our modern culture evolved from.
Clearly with the pace of modern times, we can't create stories with the same weight, or at least we haven't figured out the trick yet.
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That provision has nothing to do with the statute of limitations. CA Penal Code sec 1385 simply permits the court to dismiss charges or enhancement allegations "in the interests of justice." The relevant CA penal code section re statutes of limitations is Section 799, which states that prosecution for rape "may be commenced at any time."
That is enough, if the jury believes them.
That is very common in criminal trials (as well as civil trials). And determining who is lying and who is telling the truth is what juries do. The unanimity requirement (and CA uses 12 jurors, unlike some states) and beyond a reasonable doubt standard of proof hopefully provides some protection for defendants; that being said, I share your criticism of lengthy or nonexistent statutes of limitations. I am merely describing the law and explaining how the conviction happened, not defending it.
Except?
Which is consistent with what I read about how murky the decision about SOL of limitations in the Masterson case were. This enhanced SOL statute had a grandfather clause. The article I read state the only way around the grandfather clause were the aggravating circumstances outlined in CA's "One Strike Law". My reading of those circumstances is that they don't apply to Masterson since there was no prior conviction. Just... stories.
It is not that murky, and it isn't really a grandfather clause. It is there to make sure that the extension of the statute of limitations does not run afoul of the ex post facto clause, which invalidates extensions which apply to crimes on which the SOL has already run
So, whether his prosecution was barred by the SOL depends on what the SOL was when the crime was committed, and when the SOL was extended. Note also that the SOL can be tolled, including when the defendant is out of state.
I don't understand the reference to prior convictions; what does that have to do with the SOL? Edit: Ok I looked at the one-strike statute and looked around, and apparently the issue is not that he had prior convictions (sec 667.61(d)(1)) but rather that "The defendant has been convicted in the present case or cases of committing an offense specified in subdivision (c) against more than one victim." (sec 667.61(d)(4)). That seems to be consistent with established CA law. Eg People v. Stewart (2004) 119 Cal.App.4th 163. Again, this is not meant to be a defense of the law, but merely a description.
Anyhow, if there are SOL issues, they will be raised on appeal and will be pretty easily resolved. Both the facts and law re pretty clear.
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Wow, there's no way that wooziness, disorientation, and passing out could be explained by mere alcohol, these women must have been drugged!
Seriously, how the hell is anyone supposed to defend themselves from this other than simply replying, "uhhh, yeah, they might have been real drunk, we were indeed partying"? I keep looking at cases like this and trying to figure out how I could possibly exonerate myself if someone I hooked up with from a party 20 years ago claimed that I "drugged" her, and I've got absolutely nothing. In this case, one of them was evidently his girlfriend at the time; I really have no idea how I could defend myself if my wife decides a decade from now that having sex after we both got home bordering on a blackout drunk New Year's Eve was actually "rape".
Is there some steelman explanation I'm missing for how this could plausibly be a legitimate trial with legitimate evidence? It seems like it's literally some women that got drunk and had sex with Masterson that decided a decade later that they were actually drugged, without even the slightest bit of physical evidence for the claim. Never mind being sufficient for a reasonable doubt, I just flat out don't believe them at all.
I think the problem is you're envisioning "drugging" someone as requiring use of, like, rohypnol or other illicit drugs. I would be willing to bet that, in California, "getting someone so drunk they lose consciousness" counts as "drugging."
We know the double standard on what "drugging someone" means as well as you do.
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I reject "getting someone drunk" as a framing that should apply to an adult. At a festival this summer, I wound up so inebriated that I had to go lie down in the shade and take a nap. Had I wanted to get up prior to sleeping it off a bit, I would have had a tough time doing so. Was I drugged? Did someone "get me drunk"? Was my wife, who was with me the entire time, responsible for my drunken state? I'm inclined to say that as an adult who has more than a passing familiarity with alcohol that I was solely responsible for my state of being.
Indeed, the topic of women and alcohol, especially if sex is involved, is a recurring source of horseshoe compass unity between libleft and authright when it comes to women's (lack of) agency and accountability:
Even when a woman is ascribed some semblance of agency and culpability, double standards and Russell conjugations arrive to provide mitigating and inverting factors.
You, @Walterodim, got drunk and became an embarrassing oaf and burden to deal with. What kind of man-child husband has to lie in the shade to sleep off his inebriation? In similar but reversed circumstances, your wife would had just had a bit too much to drink and it was beyond time for you two to retire for the night anyway. What kind of man-child husband would leave his wife in the shade to sleep off her inebriation?
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Not sure I agree. I can imagine a scenario where it would be sensible to describe A as having gotten B drunk, or drugged them with alcohol. An obvious example would be A adding some more potent alcohol to B's drink without B's knowledge or consent.
North by Northwest features a good example of what I would describe as the minimum necessary for me to say A(really A1, A2, and A3) has gotten B drunk. I would not describe someone making strong cocktails as having gotten the other party drunk. Not when martinis are often made with often far less less than a splash of Vermouth everywhere.
I don't agree. To more fully lay out a theory of when I think it's appropriate to say something like "A got B drunk" I think of A taking some action that overcomes B's own intentions about how drunk to get to cause B to become much more intoxicated than they intended. The scene in North by Northwest you link obviously involves overcoming someone's intentions by force but I think it can also be done by fraud. Sure, if your martini has an extra shot worth of Vermouth in it or whatever I wouldn't call that enough by itself. But I think spiking an otherwise non-alcoholic drink or mixing less alcoholic drinks (like beer) with more alcoholic ones (like whiskey) without the knowledge or consent of the subject can rise to a similar level.
Not to condescend, but are you familiar with the beverages in question from firsthand experience? I ask because these couple sentences include three things that seem very odd to me:
Yes, I drink quite frequently myself. I intend them as a kind of illustrative example, not necessarily to be taken literally. They are the pointing finger, not the moon.
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I have to imagine that all but the least experienced drinker could tell a boilermaker (beer with whisky) from a beer by taste alone.
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I can imagine edge cases where this is true, but to say that they're noncentral is putting it lightly. If we're talking about someone that's coerced in some fashion or has so little experience with alcohol that they don't know what to expect, OK, I get it, that's not literally impossible. More broadly though, I think adults can pretty well tell if a cocktail is pretty stiff and if they make a mistake and wind up drunker than they were expecting, they should take some degree of responsibility for monitoring their own intake. If someone hands you an old fashioned, you can pretty well guess that there are roughly two standard drinks worth of bourbon in there. If you get a gin and tonic, you can take a sip and have a reasonable guess at how strong you think it is. If you're at a party where you really don't know people that well, sticking with things that you can count is probably a good idea in general.
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Which is the whole point behind SOLs. There is no way to mount a proper defense.
Of course, if I was a jury and the defendant merely stated “I was drugged” and there was zero corroborating evidence I don’t see how I could vote to convict.
Feminism has been very successful at changing people’s default assumption (ie if there is an allegation it is probably true).
There are two or three points really. One is, as you say. That it's more or less impossible to ensure a fair trial 20 years after the crime. Another is rooted in the cultural desire for a speedy trial to prevent the process from eclipsing the punishment. And thirdly, it incentivizes law enforcement to pursue justice quickly instead of sitting on an inconvenient case.
All three are represented in the Masterson case.
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It’s pretty simple. Rule of evidence 413. This is an exception to the general principle (rule 404) that prior bad acts are inadmissible to prove propensity in court. If you were charging someone with robbing a bank, you wouldn’t be able to put a witness on the stand who says they were robbed by the defendant at a CVS in a completely separate incident years prior. That’s prejudicial and against rule 404. Rule 413 let’s you do that in sexual assault cases.
The analogous CA provision is Evidence Code section 1108
And note that a prior robbery might indeed be admissible under certain circumstances, if admitted to prove something other than propensity, such as motive, intent, identity. or common plan (i.e, M.O.). At least that is the law in California:
People v. Ewoldt, 7 Cal.4th 380 (1994)
But do we know for sure that past assaults were used against him?
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