Court Opinion

ID: 9647624
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-23 13:43:00.78109+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:11:51.352753
License: Public Domain

David Newbern, Justice, dissenting. All of the reasons for my disagreement with the majority are stated in my dissenting opinion in the companion case, Doby v. State, 290 Ark. 408, 720 S.W.2d 694, being released today. However, I cannot resist pointing out that, as in Doby v. State, supra, the majority opinion plays on the facts with less emphasis given to that which should receive the attention of an appellate court, that is, the law. We must ever bear in mind that our job is to leave factual determinations to trial judges and jurors while we determine how they fit with statutes and precedential decisions. The majority opinion notes that the appellant was found by the jury to have engaged in sexual intercourse with his fourteen-year-old daughter. The majority opinion, however, then states it is “inconceivable to us” that the appellant could defend on the basis she could have consented. Whether she consented is a factual determination which, in this case, the jury should have been allowed to make. The general assembly has established fourteen as the age of consent, Ark. Stat. Ann. § 41-1803(c) (Supp. 1985), and it makes no exception for parent-child intercourse. Whether it is “inconceivable to us” is thus irrelevant unless the facts presented by the state showed forcible compulsion and no rational alternative. If the state had, for example, shown the victim to have been beaten or threatened into submission and that the person who engaged in sexual intercourse with her was the same person who did those things, then I would agree there would have been no rational basis for any instruction on a lesser included offense. That was not the case here. For the reasons stated in my dissenting opinion in Doby v. State, supra, I conclude we should not determine the propriety of lesser included offense instructions on the basis of the accused’s denial of guilt. Purtle and Dudley, JJ., join in this dissent.