New York City
New York's Rape Law Has a Loophole You Could Drive a Fraternity Through
By BSN Staff, . BSN Network. Satire.
ALBANY, N.Y.: New York Governor Kathy Hochul stood before cameras on Friday to announce that the state's sexual assault statutes do not currently protect a person who becomes too intoxicated to consent after voluntarily drinking, a legal loophole so large and so specific that it raises the question of whether someone put it there on purpose or whether the legislature just got tired around page forty.
The announcement was prompted by an alleged 2024 gang rape at Cornell University involving seven students, a case that had been sitting with the Tompkins County District Attorney's office for approximately one year before Attorney General Letitia James decided she had seen enough of the Tompkins County District Attorney's office.
Hochul called the situation a "gap" in New York's consent laws, which is one way to describe it. Another way is that the state essentially codified the argument that defense attorneys have been making at trial since the 1980s and then forgot to tell anybody.
"New York will not allow a legal technicality to stand between a survivor and justice," Hochul said at the press conference, six months after the alleged assault, twelve months after investigators were notified, and approximately forty years after the law was written.
The Cornell case involves seven students accused of assaulting a woman at an off-campus fraternity event in February 2024. Under current New York law, if a victim voluntarily consumed alcohol before an assault, the incapacity defense available to prosecutors narrows significantly, a fact that legal experts describe as a problem and that the Cornell Greek system apparently describes as a scheduling consideration.
Attorney General James, who took formal jurisdiction over the case Friday, said her office would pursue charges aggressively, which is a different posture than the one Tompkins County adopted, which legal observers have described as "horizontal."
"We are committed to a full and thorough investigation," James said in a statement that contained the words full, thorough and committed, in that order, without specifying what any of them meant for the seven individuals who have had twelve months to study abroad.
Hochul's office said the Governor would push the state legislature to close the consent gap before the end of the session, a timeline that legislative insiders described as ambitious given that the legislature also has to decide whether to rename a bridge.
New York joins a small and not particularly proud list of states that discovered their rape statutes had structural problems after a high-profile case demonstrated them in real time. Legal reformers have been flagging the voluntary intoxication issue in New York specifically since at least 2019, a detail the Governor's office did not address, possibly because addressing it would require a different kind of press conference.
The seven Cornell students have not been charged. Their attorneys did not respond to requests for comment, which, given the circumstances, is probably the correct legal strategy and definitely the correct human one.
Hochul said the state owes survivors "the full protection of the law." Effective, she estimates, sometime this spring, assuming the session goes well.
The story we are making fun of: https://www.amny.com/news/cornell-7-case-hochul-james-rape-investigation/