Last Thursday, John Robert Lind of Blaine Minnesota pled guilty to misdemeanor “lewd conduct” charges. Lind’s “lewd conduct?”
He repeatedly, over the course of six months, jacked off into a co-worker’s coffee, and onto her desk, when she wasn’t there.
She eventually caught him standing next to her desk with his hands near his junk and what she called a “deer-in-the-headlights look” on his face, the local CBS affiliate reported. After he hurried away, she noticed “a puddle on the desk” and realized that it hadn’t been spoiled milk that had been making her coffee taste bad. For six months.
Lind, who fessed up to it all, was originally charged with two counts of criminal sexual conduct. But a judge threw out both counts because the statute under which he was charged didn’t define his particular acts as a kind of “sexual contact.”
He could have been charged with criminal sexual conduct if he had ejaculated on her directly. But not for ejaculating on her desk — or into the coffee that she later, unknowingly, drank. And so the New Brighton City Attorney had to resort to a lesser charge.
The victim in this case, Pat Maahs, went public in an attempt to get the law changed. State Representative Debra Hilstrom has taken up this crusade, introducing a bill (now in committee) to close this loophole, making “adulteration by bodily fluid” a felony if an unknowing victim actually eats or drinks the food in question. But in the meantime, at least as Minnesota law sees it, Lind’s actions only count as misdemeanor “lewd conduct,” and won’t even put him on the sex offenders’ registry.
In some ways the creepiest part of the whole story is that Lind, the awkward ejaculator, says he did it not to harass Maahs, but because he was attracted to her, and evidently this was the best way he could think of to express his interest.
EDIT: Fixed wording in one place; corrected the spelling of the victim’s last name.
@freemage:
I remember that case. From what I recall, “peeping tom” laws did apply to people in their underwear, but only when they were in places with a reasonable expectation of privacy (like a home). Apparently “under your clothes” is not a place with a reasonable expectation of privacy.
With the various legal cases I’ve been following recently, I’m starting to realize that the law is really just a (poorly maintained) instruction set, not a moral code. The goal of the justice system is to apply a bunch of if-then rules; IF this crime meets this definition THEN the sentence must be something like this. The job of the prosecutor is to figure out which laws might apply and then argue that they do, not figure out what the crime actually is.
I kinda wonder what it’d be like if laws actually had a side-by-side “intent” section written in plain language, so people wouldn’t have to assume the law is written literally and completely. I guess it’d be more complicated to argue that a law does or does not apply, and you’d still have to do some interpretation of the intent, but I wonder if the cost would be outweighed by the benefits.
Kirby: Exactly. That’s one reason I mentioned the Siri-abortion debacle; the lawmakers, like the programmers, are so resoundingly male that they write those if-thens without considering what ‘ifs’ are likely to come up for women.
The peeping tom laws are an example of what happens when laws become technologically obsolete–once upon a time (in my lifetime, really), getting a camera lens into that position required a lot of effort and expense, and even then was almost certain to be found out. Usually, voyeurs made use of peepholes and ‘magic’ mirrors–hence, the ‘reasonable expectation of privacy’ was written with rooms in mind, rather than angles. Nowadays, there’s half a dozen different affordable options for the wannabe creep, most of which can be nigh-impossible to detect if used carefully.
As for ‘plain language’… A big part of the reason the laws are like this in the first place is that ‘plain language’ usually has lots of options for willful misinterpretation. A biased judge is a terrible thing, and it can be ten times worse in the case where there’s no hard-and-fast restraint. Torture an interpretation out of the ‘plain language’ section, then declare that, having read it that way, you can ignore the if-then instructions of the actual law, based on the lawmakers’ ‘intent’. Go far enough, and you’ll get overturned on appeal, but waiting for an appellate court can often make things that much dicier.
Also, prosecutors rarely seek appeals on rulings, unless exceptionally egregious. There’s a reason for that–if you appeal and lose the appeal, then the ruling becomes precedent for all courts within the appellate court’s jurisdiction. Let a bad ruling stand in a local court, and the next district over (or even other judges in that district) can rule differently. Get enough good rulings, THEN appeal if it still is being done ‘wrongly’ in some districts; that way, you have a solid case for why your way is right.
GROANNNNNNNNNN.
Very punny.
Sorry if this has already been posted but Frangela is all over this NSFW and hopefully not upsetting to anyone
ew
ew
ewwwwwwwww
Eesh. Depending on the legal language of the bill(s) amending the requisite laws governing illicit sexual conduct–i.e., if bodily fluids being (justly) considered potential vectors for infectious disease–I can see the MRA/RedPill/MGTOW outrage already:
“SJWs Furious at Office Romance, Propose Law to Reclassify Sperm as ‘Infectious Pathogen’ in Retaliation”
Just to let you know that on May 22, 2015 the Governor of the state of Minnesota signed into law 2 things that would cover this behavior. Now it is criminal sexual conduct to make contact with someone else with seminal fluid when it isn’t consensual contact and it is illegal to adulterate someone’s food with bodily fluids when there is expectation of someone else consuming it.
The bills went into effect August 1, 2015