Opinion ID: 2334199
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 7

Heading: Applying Force or Fear as a Single Means

Text: Having digressed briefly, we return to how force or fear as a single means of committing rape should be applied in this case. First, there must be some commonality or relationship between the type of force that suffices to violate the rape statute and the fear that does. In other words, the victim must be fearful of the sort of force contemplated in the statute. Absent that connection, force and fear would amount to alternative means of committing rape. They would be sufficiently distinct to be separate ways of overcoming a victim. Consistent with our understanding of Wright, we now consider the sorts of force and concomitant fear that are sufficiently coercive to overcome a victim under K.S.A. 2005 Supp. 21-3502. Plainly, physical force applied to the victim suffices. And, in turn, a threat of physical harm to the victim to compel compliance also violates the rape statute by inducing fear. A threat need not be verbalized; a perpetrator armed with a weapon presents a sufficient threat without saying a word. See State v. Borthwick, 255 Kan. 899, 900, Syl. ¶ 7, 880 P.2d 1261 (1994) (A rape victim need not be overcome by force in the form of a beating or physical restraint; fear is sufficient.). Likewise, a threat need not be of immediate harm to induce fear. A perpetrator's threat to come to the victim's workplace and shoot her certainly could cause fear. A perpetrator who knowingly exploits a victim's extreme phobia, by definition an irrational fear, to overcome resistance probably commits rape. The test for fear is a subjective one. In other words, did the victim genuinely fear harm even though a reasonable person in the same situation might not? See Borthwick, 255 Kan. at 913, 880 P.2d 1261 (The victim's fear of force need not be such that [it] would prevent resistance by a reasonable person.). The perpetrator's threat to expose the victim to conditions or circumstances that would trigger the phobia thereby causing fear probably suffices to establish a submissible jury case. That sort of threat might well implicate another means of committing rape in which the victim is incapable of giving consent because of mental deficiency or disease. K.S.A. 2005 Supp. 21-3502(a)(1)(C). The actions of the perpetrator also might well require the use of force or threat of force. For example, were the victim an agoraphobic, someone with the fear of open spaces or the outdoors, the perpetrator presumably would threaten to force the victim outside of his or her home, thus inducing the fear, anxiety, and other discomfort associated with his or her condition. We do not mean to belabor unnecessarily the phobic as victimthe circumstance is unlikely to come up commonly. But the soundness of judicial reasoning is often tested by its application to the unusual situation. And the boundaries of statutory law are regularly defined by those situations, as this case illustrates. Physical harm or the threat of harm to a close relative or friend of the victim, particularly someone residing in the same household, would be adequate. The term force is neither limited to the victim nor otherwise qualified in the rape statute. As with much else in the criminal law, sorting out the circumstances of the force or fear and their sufficiency to overcome the victim's resistance commonly would be for a well-instructed jury looking at the particular facts of a given case. Borthwick, 255 Kan. at 899, Syl. ¶ 5, 880 P.2d 1261. There could be peculiar (and rare) circumstances in which a jury might find the victim's fear to be honestly held but wholly without foundation or the perpetrator's threat of physical harm so improbable to carry out as to be fantastic. Those determinations would stand apart from prototypical credibility determinations for jurors, such as a defendant's claims of mistaken identity or consent. Applying the force or fear means of committing rape becomes more difficult when the perpetrator's actions entail economic harm, rather than physical injury. Again, nothing in the broad phrasing of force or fear in K.S.A. 2005 Supp. 21-3502 suggests the term is limited to physical injury. If a rapist began destroying especially valuable propertyfine art or antiquesand intended to stop only if the victim had sexual relations, a jury could render a fully supportable guilty verdict under Kansas law. Similarly, a cognizable threat to burn down the victim's home contemplates use of force and would be sufficient to support a jury finding of fear on the victim's part. There likely would be a point at which the resulting economic harm might be too slight to support a charge as a matter of law. We needn't determine that point, for the evidence here shows J.P. did not believe the threat to publicize her affair would have any economic impact on her. And there would be some pointperhaps a different onebeyond which the State might reasonably predict a jury could be expected to bring back a not guilty verdict because the threatened financial harm was essentially inconsequential in a given factual setting. A prosecutor reasonably might choose not to charge that case. Other economic threats entail no application of force immediately or in the future and, thus, could not induce the sort of fear necessary to violate K.S.A. 2005 Supp. 21-3502. For example, a perpetrator could threaten to spread false rumors to the major customers of the victim's company that the business was under criminal investigation or insolvent if the victim refused sexual demands. The victim might well fear the loss of some of those customers and comply with the demand. But the perpetrator's actions do not amount to a use of force or a threat of force. In that instance, the perpetrator would have violated the blackmail statute, just as Brooks did here. Those circumstances, however, do not fit within the rape statute. J.P.'s predicament was still further removed from the proscribed conduct in K.S.A. 2005 Supp. 21-3502. Even if Brooks carried out his threat to publicize the affair, J.P., by her own reckoning, faced no economic loss or harm. She believed she would have been acutely embarrassed in the workplace, perhaps ostracized by some colleagues, and otherwise scorned or ridiculed. Those concerns certainly seem rational and legitimate. The emotional impact of the disclosure on J.P. may have been substantial. She certainly thought it would be; she submitted to Brooks' demand for sex to avoid precisely that possibility. We do not diminish those considerations. But the threat Brooks made did not involve any present or future application of force and, in turn, the response it provoked in J.P., however disquieting or upsetting, did not constitute fear of the sort that supports a rape charge under the Kansas law. As a result, the jury's verdict rests on insufficient evidence to demonstrate the statutory elements of rape. The result here is a product of the Kansas Criminal Code's failure to address in some specific fashion the sort of tactic Brooks used. He essentially extorted sex from J.P. in what the jury found amounted to rape by blackmail. But the conduct doesn't fit the definition of rape and seems substantially worse than what's proscribed and punished as blackmail. As we have also suggested, this outcome seems to be the result of inadvertent omission in drafting the criminal code rather than a conscious policy choice to impose a comparatively lenient punishment on a criminal like Brooks. The criminal code simply does not speak directly to the criminality of threatening to invade a person's privacy or to expose him or her to public ignominy as a means of extracting sexual relations. The code fails to consider the intersection of those two strands of antisocial behavior to carry out a single criminal endeavor. The blackmail statute applies only because it has been drafted in generic terms to cover forcing a person to do something by threatening public ridicule or disgrace. It doesn't expressly take into account circumstances where that something is coerced sexual relations. The offense of sexual battery, K.S.A. 21-3517, also would apply to what Brooks did to J.P. The crime entails intentionally touching someone without his or her consent for purposes of arous[ing] or satisfy[ing] the sexual desires of the offender or another. Again, the statutory language covers what happened in this case. But it seems unlikely the statute aims to punish the criminal act of penetration as an intentional touching, as that term is used. Sexual battery is a misdemeanor. The code has also criminalized aggravated sexual battery, proscribing the same type of touching when the perpetrator uses some of the same kinds of means prohibited in the rape statute, including force or fear. Aggravated sexual battery is a severity level 5 person felony. But it would not apply here for the same reasons the rape statute does not.