People v. Thompson

Facts

A group home for the developmentally disabled hired the defendant to to help care for its residents, including the victim, a woman with down syndrome. She testified that at 2:00 a.m., defendant came into her bedroom while she was asleep. He took off his clothes, then got on top of her. She was wearing a nightgown but no underwear. She testified: “I felt his fingers to open my vagina and put his penis inside of me.” Then he put his penis in her mouth. She did not move or say anything because she was “sound asleep.”

At 3:00 a.m., defendant left. At 3:15 a.m., however, he came back and said, “Don’t tell nobody about this.” The victim’s vagina hurt; she was “in a lot of pain.” She cried “[f]or a long time.” The next morning, she phoned her mother and told her that defendant had “raped” and “molested” her. She sounded very upset. Her mother took her to a hospital. Doctors found a small tear in her posterior fourchette and signs of a forced entry.

At trial, her mother described her as “naïve” and “very trusting.” The victim talked at a level of a nine or ten year old child. When asked what happened, the victim answered, “I been raped.” She defined that as “[w]hen a man wants to have sex” but she “wasn’t ready to have sex” with him. When asked what sex is, she kept calling it “special love.” She also answered that sex is when you “fall in love, get married, have sex, get somebody pregnant and have a baby.” She added that, a couple of weeks after the honeymoon, the couple can “faint” or “pass out” and get pregnant.

The defendant was convicted of rape on the theory that the victim was “at the time incapable, because of a mental disorder or developmental or physical disability, of giving legal consent.” He appealed, arguing that there was insufficient evidence that the victim was incapable of giving consent.