9/29

Today in class two of us presented our cases, Holly and myself. I went first and gave the details on my Julio Morales case.

The Julio Morales case begins with a man named Julio Morales and a party at his friends house in Los Angeles, California. Julio's friend's (who was hosting the party) sister (Jane Doe) had been out at the party with her boyfriend when Jane and her boyfriend decided to go lay down in her room. They decided they were not going to have sex as Jane's boyfriend didn't have any condoms at the time and they wanted to be safe; however, they were sexually active. Jane fell asleep and her boyfriend got up and left the room to go outside with a few friends. Julio and another friend went into Jane's room to wake her up to come back out to the party, but when she wouldn't wake up Julio's friend left. Julio turned around to notice the door was shut, "tried to open it and thought it was locked" (doors don't lock from the outside) and decided instead to start trying to hook up with Jane. He began kissing her and allegedly she kissed back; however, at the same time, Julio realized Jane probably thought he was her boyfriend. Julio then removed Jane's pajama pants and began to forcibly rape her, once Jane woke up completely she realized it wasn't her boyfriend and began screaming and pushing Julio off. Julio reinserted his penis in Jane and then she called her boyfriend and Julio got up and left the room, told his friend (Jane's brother) he had "fucked up" and left the house. Jane's boyfriend came into the room and called the police immediately, who then found Julio hiding in the bushes. When Jane's case originally went to court, it was said that since Jane and her boyfriend weren't married, under section 261 of the California law, impersonating her boyfriend did not make it rape. If they would have been married, Julio would have been sentenced much more severely. During his first case, he was found innocent of impersonation and got three years in prison for sexual violence but got off of rape of an unconscious person. When this case returned to appellate court, the original sentence was overturned and Julio was found guilty of raping an unconscious person; however, since he had already served 3 years he wasn't required to serve any longer, but he was forced to register as a sex offender.

This case has a lot of interesting loopholes built in, and challenges a law that was set forth in 1872, when women were still property. I think I want to take this case and look into the history of the statute and see how it has played itself out in other cases and how that compares to this specific case. There are a lot of ways I could go with this, but this seems the most interesting.

Holly looked up the Brock Turner case, that of the Stanford swimmer who raped a girl behind a dumpster and served only 3 months of a very SHORT 6 month sentence. This plays into the idea that the judge didn't want to "ruin his life" by convicting him of a harsher sentence. This clearly doesn't take into account the fact that the girl Turner raped is forced to deal with psychological repercussions the rest of her life.