2 year old woman accused of exposure and sex with 7 teens at Scottsdale bar mitzvah
03-28-2015, 10:09 PM
I should correct what I said in my previous post, which was garbled.
I meant to say that--in most jurisdictions--a person can't willfully get drunk or high, and then use that impairment to say that they had no "intent" to commit a crime.
Defendants sometimes try to do this, but it hardly ever works. Check this out:
Because specific intent is an essential element in proving many torts and crimes, defendants often argue that they did not possess the specific intent required and therefore are not guilty or liable for the crime or tort committed. In fact, most jurisdictions recognize by statute or case law certain defenses to the formation of specific intent. For example, a defendant may argue that at the time a crime was committed she was intoxicated and that her mental impairment kept her from formulating the specific intent to commit the crime. Voluntary intoxication is not a defense to the commission of general-intent crimes, but in many jurisdictions it is a defense to specific-intent crimes. In other jurisdictions voluntary intoxication is never a defense to the commission of a crime. Most jurisdictions permit the defense of involuntary intoxication even if they do not recognize voluntary intoxication. Courts generally permit expert witness testimony on the issue of whether the defendant had the ability to form specific intent.
I took this passage above from here:
http://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionar...fic+Intent
I also was not correct when I said that rape was a specific intent crime. It actually is not. Rape is defined as a "general intent" crime:
http://scholarlycommons.law.wlu.edu/cgi/...text=wlulr
Here is a quote from the last paragraph of this article, which supports my earlier statement:
It is submitted that rape cannot be a specific intent crime. For that reason, voluntary intoxication, short of rendering a person insane,
should never be a defense for any criminal who violently and unlawfully penetrates the person of a female. The commission of those
acts which constitute rape gives rise to a conclusive presumption of the existence of the intent to commit the crime; and the fact that the accused may have been devoid of inhibition as the result of his alcoholic stupefication is without importance.
This stuff can get very confusing and complicated, because jurisdictions can vary a lot in how they handle things. But the basic principle that we need to keep in mind is that you can't deliberately get drunk or high and then use that as an excuse for your crimes.
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