Court Opinion

ID: 9746034
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-27 13:52:41.976403+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:25:08.119973
License: Public Domain

RUSHING, P. J., Dissenting.
I respectfully dissent.
Introduction
It goes without saying that a gentleman does not take advantage of a lady who has had too much to drink. He who does so is no gentleman, and is deservedly held up to general contempt. But if the lady accedes to his advances, or appears to do so, he is not guilty of rape, and if he persuades her to accompany him in the hope that she will accede, he is not guilty of kidnapping for rape.
Defendant has been sentenced to spend the rest of his life in prison on evidence that could quite reasonably be taken to show no more than that he prevailed upon a young woman, who had had too much to drink, to accompany him, presumably with the objective—in his mind anyway—of sexual intercourse. I would not quarrel with this result if a properly instructed jury had found on substantial evidence, after a fair trial, that the young lady was a veritable patient etherized upon a table, or at least in such a stupor as to be manifestly only semiconscious. But the evidence here was heavily compromised by the fact that the only evidence of such a condition came from the young woman herself. No one else testified about what happened between the time she left her friends about 2:00 a.m. and the time she fled a Hayward motel room less than an hour later. Defendant’s conviction necessarily stands or falls on her account. But that account consisted largely of her inability to say what had taken place between herself and defendant. It was undisputed that she had been drinking so heavily that she could at best report sporadic and fleeting memories of those critical minutes.
Ordinarily a key witness’s inability to recall important events would be viewed as a serious liability to the proponent of her testimony. Here, however, the prosecutor made a strength of weakness by inviting the jury to assume that one who drinks as much as the alleged complainant had, and who later reports only flashes of memory, must have been intoxicated to the point of unconsciousness, or near-unconsciousness, when those events occurred.
*335The entire prosecution case was built upon this proposition, because the kidnapping charge presupposed that the complainant had been incapable of moving, or consenting to be moved, when defendant drove her to Hayward.
To rebut the prosecution’s central inference, the defense sought to show, through expert testimony, that people who drink the way the complainant had been drinking may be remarkably awake, active, and competent at the peak of intoxication, but yet experience a particular form of amnesia erasing some or all memory of events, including their own conduct. Moreover, the expert would have testified, persons experiencing such amnesia may “fill in” gaps in their memory with confabulation, i.e., Active memories.
I cannot escape the conclusion that in the context of this case, the proffered testimony possessed enormous probative value. It went straight to the heart of the prosecution case by casting serious doubt not only on the accuracy of the testimony given by the sole witness to the alleged crime, but also on the central inference on which the prosecution case rested. I see no sound basis for excluding such critical evidence. That ruling may well have determined the jury’s verdict. Because defendant was entitled to present any competent evidence tending to raise a reasonable doubt about his guilt, I would reverse the judgment. I am therefore obliged, with the utmost respect, to dissent.1
*336I. Probative Value
Probative value refers to the tendency of evidence to prove or disprove an element of the crime, or a defense. Under the instructions given here, the elements of the crime of which the jury found defendant guilty were: “One, the defendant intended to commit rape; two, acting with that intent, the defendant used enough physical force to take and carry away an unresisting person with a mental impairment; three, acting with that intent, the defendant moved the person with a mental impairment a substantial distance; four, the person was moved or made to move a distance beyond that merely incidental to the commission of a rape; five, the person suffered from a mental impairment that made her incapable of giving legal consent to the movement; and six, the defendant did not actually and reasonably believe that the other person consented to the movement.” (Italics added.)
Several of these elements depended on the hypothesis that the complainant was intoxicated to the point of stupor. The prosecutor’s only argument to the jury in support of the element of force was that alcohol had rendered the complainant so torpid, indeed inert, that she was incapable of entering defendant’s car under her own power.2 This argument is quite revealing because it amounts to an implicit concession that the only way jurors could rationally infer the requisite application of force—even the gentle touching the prosecutor assured them was enough—was to believe that the complainant was physically incapable of entering the car on her own. A state of intoxication close to stupefaction was also indispensable to the elements that the complainant was “unconscious or . . . incapable of giving legal consent,” and that defendant “did not actually and reasonably believe that the [complainant] consented to the movement.”
These elements, it must be emphasized, are quite distinct from the “intent to rape” element and from any subsidiary factors—such as reasonable belief *337in consent to sexual intercourse—that might bear on that element. The charge here was kidnapping—a movement of the complainant by force and without consent. If a kidnapping was not proven, defendant’s ultimate intentions were academic. And a kidnapping was not proven if the jury entertained a reasonable doubt on any one of the following three propositions: (1) Defendant used force to accomplish the movement of the complainant; (2) the complainant was unconscious or incapable of giving consent to the movement; or (3) defendant did not reasonably believe the complainant consented to the movement.
The prosecution’s proof of each of those propositions depended on interpreting the complainant’s intermittent memories to mean that she was, in respondent’s words, “passing in and out of consciousness.” This premise also tended to shield the prosecution case from challenge by rendering the complainant’s selective recollections invulnerable to conventional cross-examination. Thus even as she was professing to have been “out of it” for the entire time in question, she also testified that she was “pretty much positive” she had not spoken to defendant, that she had not nodded or pointed in response to anything he said, and did not agree to get into his car.
Dr. Breithaupt would have supplied a competing explanation for these intermittent memories. According to him, acute alcohol intoxication can cause a “spree” drinker with a high tolerance to lose, or never to store, memories of events in which she might have been an active participant. The loss of memory may be total (“en bloc”) or intermittent (“fragmentary” or “fragmented”). Further, in cases of fragmentary amnesia the subject may “fill in the gaps” in her memory with “confabulation,” i.e., false memories of what happened. This means that an acutely intoxicated person might (1) fail to recall events in which she actively and consciously took part, and (2) replace the missing memory with false recollections of things that did not occur.
Obviously such testimony would have dropped a big fly in the prosecutorial ointment. By educating the jury about alcohol-based amnesia, it could cast an entirely different light on the complainant’s patchwork recollections of the night in question. It could raise a reasonable doubt about the assumptions on which the entire prosecution case depended. I therefore cannot join the majority in concluding that the testimony possessed “extremely minimal probative value.” On the contrary, it could raise a very serious doubt about the prosecution’s central hypothesis, and very possibly mean the difference between conviction and acquittal.
II. Speculativeness
I see no sound basis for the trial court’s characterization of the testimony as “speculative.” The court approached the question as if the defense were *338required to affirmatively prove that the complainant had actually experienced alcohol-induced amnesia. The defense had no such burden. The appropriate question was whether the jury could reasonably infer that the complainant might have suffered alcohol-induced amnesia, and that the possibility was substantial enough to raise a reasonable doubt about defendant’s guilt. The evidence before the jury was more than sufficient to this purpose. A juror educated in the phenomenon of alcohol-induced amnesia would have acted quite reasonably in concluding that the complainant’s intermittent memories were just as likely to be products of fragmentary amnesia as they were to be the products of, and evidence for, the all-important prosecution hypothesis that she was “passing in and out of consciousness.” The same reasonable juror could conclude that her incriminating affirmative recollections—that she did not walk to the car, that she did not consent to accompany defendant— were just as likely to be the products of confabulation as of fortuitous (for the prosecution) returns to consciousness.
Dr. Breithaupt’s testimony was conceptually identical to evidence that a certain drug, at certain dosage levels, tends to produce hallucinations in a certain class of users. If the sole prosecution witness to key facts is shown to belong to that class of users, and to have absorbed the required dosage of that drug at the time of the events related by him, evidence of his susceptibility to hallucinations under those conditions would go directly to his “capacity to perceive [and] to recollect . . . any matter about which he testifies.” (Evid. Code, § 780, subd. (c).) Hence it would be directly relevant to “the truthfulness of his testimony,” a subject on which the jury is entitled to consider “any matter” that has a reasonable bearing. (Id., § 780.) To be sure, such evidence might be excluded as speculative if the probability of hallucinations were so slight that it could not support a reasonable doubt about the truthfulness of the testimony. But that can hardly be said here where the witness’s own testimony lent affirmative support to the defense hypothesis. Thus the complainant testified, “I’m pretty sure we walked [between bars], and I don’t remember doing that.” She also did not remember where she was lying in the alley when supposedly found by defendant, though she presumably walked to that location. In light of Dr. Breithaupt’s testimony, walking somewhere and having no memory of it could furnish a textbook case of alcohol-induced amnesia. Indeed, the complainant all but directly testified that she experienced such amnesia, stating that at times she “[was] doing things” that she “[didn’t] remember.” Dr. Breithaupt’s testimony would have highlighted the importance of this testimony and its potential significance in evaluating the rest of the complainant’s account.
I repeat, however, that defendant was under no burden to prove that the complainant actually experienced amnesia with respect to the period in question. He was entitled, in the absence of a sound basis for exclusion, to present any evidence that tended to raise a reasonable doubt about his guilt *339by putting in question the verisimilitude of the complainant’s account of events or the soundness of the inferences the prosecution drew from that account. Dr. Breithaupt’s testimony had both effects. It was not speculative.
III. Lay Familiarity with Subject
It is suggested that the effects of alcohol on memory are well known and therefore not a proper subject of expert testimony. The concept of an alcohol-induced “blackout” is not wholly unfamiliar, at least in cultures where heavy drinking is a reasonably familiar practice. Late night comedy is rife with jokes about waking up next to someone the storyteller has no recollection of meeting. But vague folk awareness is no substitute for competent expert testimony about a recognized medical phenomenon. Further, the proffered testimony went beyond or diverged from lay conceptions in at least three potentially critical respects. One was that blackouts are more common in “serious spree drinker[s] with high tolerance.” A jury could certainly find that this description applied to the complainant here. Another was the medical recognition of fragmentary as distinct from en bloc amnesia—a distinction that could help to explain the complainant’s professed ability to remember events sporadically. The third was that persons subject to blackouts, at least of the fragmentary type, may fill in the amnesic gaps with confabulated memories. All of these points bore directly on the issues raised by the prosecution, and defendant was entitled to present them for the jury’s consideration in assessing those issues.
IV. Confusion

A. “Blackout”

My colleagues also conclude that the trial court could properly find the evidence so “confusing and misleading” as to justify its complete exclusion. (Maj. opn., ante, at p. 319.) The trial court initially identified this as its “only concern,” i.e., that Dr. Breithaupt had “confused me quite often when he was testifying.” Despite a certain loquacity and tendency to stray from the question asked—tendencies the trial judge had ample power to constrain, had he chosen to exercise it—I find nothing difficult to comprehend in the doctor’s direct testimony.3 Nor, given its critical role in the defense case, do I find the question debatable enough that the trial court could exclude it as an exercise of sound discretion.
*340The only subject of confusion to which the trial court specifically alluded was the witness’s “terminology or how he was making reference to the blackout and amnesia.” Unfortunately the court did not explain further. Certainly there is nothing confusing in the doctor’s use of “amnesia,” which was the term—hardly an unfamiliar one—he used to describe the central point in his testimony, i.e., that alcohol can sometimes interfere with the storage of perceptions and experiences during a period of intoxication, so that the drinker is thereafter unable to recall any memory, or can recall only fragmented memories, of what happened. To say that such a person has suffered an alcohol-induced amnesia is not the least bit confusing.
I will acknowledge that the lay term “blackout” carries some potential for perplexity, but not because of anything the witness said about it. Dr. Breithaupt described “blackout” as the term used “by the drinker and general public” to refer to the amnesia he was describing. He also acknowledged that it refers to “the period of time where someone is acting normally but can’t remember it later.” These statements appear entirely accurate and intelligible, as far as they go. But they point to a temporal conundrum, and a resulting potential for linguistically based confusion, that inheres in the common usage of the term. The amnesic condition with which we are concerned originates at the time of intoxication, but is only experienced some time later—unless the gaps are filled with confabulated memories, in which case it may not be experienced at all, subjectively speaking. In ordinary usage, “blackout” makes no distinction among these quite distinct aspects of the amnesic event. It may refer to the intoxicated period (“I was having a blackout”), to the malfunctioning storage of memory (“I must have blacked that out”), or to the later experienced gap in memory (“Last night is a total blackout”). The most natural of these usages—the first—is also the least accurate. The drinker is not “having” a blackout at the time of intoxication. Rather, the process inducing amnesia occurs, insensibly to him, as his perceptions fail to register in long-term memory. He only knows he has had a blackout—if indeed he ever does— when he attempts to retrieve memories of the time he was intoxicated and finds none available.
There is thus an intrinsic paradox or ambiguity in any attempt to fix a “blackout” at a particular point in time. But I see no point during his direct testimony at the 402 hearing (Evid. Code, § 402), where these intrinsic perplexities caused any difficulty. They were, however, exploited by the prosecutor, who, apart from questioning Dr. Breithaupt’s qualifications as an expert, used his cross-examination largely to sow confusion based on just such perplexities. One example was a series of questions concerning the distinction between “fragmentary” and en bloc amnesia. He professed to understand the witness to say that “[In] [t]he fragmentary blackout, a person is still able to function and talk and walk and react to things and access their memory; correct? It’s just that they might then leave that fragmentary *341blackout, go into a phase where they will later remember that; in other words they are going in and out of a fragmentary blackout, but all the while, in the fragmentary blackout, they are able to function; correct?” This is indeed a deeply confusing question, but the confusion is entirely of the questioner’s making. Dr. Breithaupt never hinted that the distinction between the two forms had anything to do with the subject’s mental state or conduct at the time of intoxication. With respect to the fragmentary type, at least, he specifically said that the subject “will not be consciously aware of it.” Rather the distinction concerned the nature of the subject’s memories of that time upon any later attempt to recall it. He described en bloc as “a total period of amnesia for a certain interval,” whereas fragmentary is “in and out a little bit.” The prosecutor’s attempt to cast this as going in and out of a “blackout” represents an adroit exploitation of the very linguistic difficulty I have just noted. The remedy there was to direct the prosecutor to ask an intelligible question, not to bar the witness from testifying. If a cross-examiner could render expert testimony inadmissible by eliciting confusing answers with confusing questions, I do not see how such testimony would ever make it into any trial. An expert witness does not have to qualify as a champion debater before he may give testimony that assists the trier of fact.
B. Diagnosing Blackouts; Acknowledged Loss of Memory
My colleagues find potential for confusion in testimony they describe as addressing “how [Dr. Breithaupt] would ‘diagnos[e]’ an alcoholic blackout.” (Maj. opn., ante, at p. 322.) Testimony on that subject would indeed seem inherently confusing, not only for the reasons I just mentioned, but also because “blackout” is not a medical term, and the construction is thus akin to “diagnosing” a hallucinogenic “trip,” a marijuana “high,” or a caffeine “buzz.” But the doctor never used any such construction. The cited testimony was elicited by the prosecutor on cross-examination, and only after relentlessly pressing Dr. Breithaupt to say how he would “diagnose” what the prosecutor interchangeably referred to as “alcohol blackout or amnesic disorder with an emphasis on alcohol.” The prosecutor used a form of the word “diagnose” or “diagnosis” at least four times before he could get Dr. Breithaupt to adopt it. Even then Dr. Breithaupt only used it to declare a particular criterion “not diagnostic.” (Italics added.) When he finally succumbed to the prosecutor’s usage, he did so not in the context of “blackouts” but rather, quite properly and rationally, “[a]mnesic disorder.” The prosecutor was the only person in court attempting to equate the two terms, or entertaining the conceit that one could “diagnose” a “blackout.”
Nor did Dr. Breithaupt ever say that such a diagnosis “depended on the individual in question ‘acknowledging] loss of memory.’ ” (Maj. opn., ante, at p. 322.) In the quoted paragraph he listed five factors that a practitioner *342would weigh in determining whether a subject had experienced alcohol-induced amnesia. Shortly before, he had stated quite clearly that while an acknowledged absence of memory “helps you with your impression,” it is “not diagnostic.”
V. Consumption of Time
Nor can I concur in the conclusion that the exclusion of the testimony was justified because, if it had been allowed, “the prosecutor would have been compelled to present more time-consuming expert testimony to rebut Breithaupt[] . . . .” (Maj. opn., ante, at p. 321.) I see no basis to suppose that the prosecutor would have been able to find a witness to “rebut” Dr. Breithaupt’s testimony. Assuming he could, the burden of rebutting solidly probative evidence is not grounds for its exclusion.
VI. Clark v. State
It is true that the witness in Clark v. State (Fla.Dist.Ct.App. 2007) 969 So.2d 573, had a known history of blackouts, which would of course enhance the probative value of expert testimony like that at issue here. For reasons I have already expressed, however, I do not believe such evidence is necessary. The question is not whether evidence positively proves that a witness’s testimony is unreliable, but whether it has “any tendency in reason” to so establish. Testimony about the effects of alcoholic amnesia is relevant whenever there is a reasonable basis in the evidence to believe that the conditions for amnesia were present, i.e., a period of acute intoxication, particularly in a spree drinker with a high tolerance, and gaps (or demonstrable inaccuracies) in the witness’s memory of that period. These conditions need not be conclusively shown, though here they were not seriously disputed. The evidence need only be substantial enough to raise a reasonable doubt about the reliability of the witness’s account of events—or the prosecution’s explanation for her inability to give an account.
Nor do I believe Clark is distinguishable on the ground that “the central issue” here was “not unconsciousness, but defendant’s intent and whether [the complainant] consented or reasonably appeared to consent.” (Maj. opn., ante, at p. 323.) As I have said, the whole prosecution case turned on the premise that the complainant was stuporous, and thus manifestly incapable of consenting, and indeed of moving. This is essentially the same issue presented in Clark, and the expert testimony had the same bearing on it.
Nor do I see any relevant difference between Florida and California law. I find nothing “startling” in the fact that Florida permits expert witnesses to opine upon the “ultimate issue” in a case. That is the modem trend, which *343California joined in 1967, when the Evidence Code took effect. (Evid. Code, § 805 [“Testimony in the form of an opinion that is otherwise admissible is not objectionable because it embraces the ultimate issue to be decided by the trier of fact.”].) What I find surprising is the lingering judicial resistance to this legislative mandate more than four decades after its adoption.
Nor is there any room here for the premise that Dr. Breithaupt’s testimony “ ‘consists of inferences and conclusions which can be drawn as easily and intelligently by the trier of fact as by the witness.’ ” (Maj. opn., ante, at p. 323, quoting People v. Torres (1995) 33 Cal.App.4th 37, 45 [39 Cal.Rptr.2d 103].) Breithaupt’s testimony did not purport to draw inferences or conclusions; rather it would have educated jurors on a subject, as to which he was an expert and they were not, that was highly relevant to the issues they had to decide.
VII. Prejudice
Given the foregoing view of the case, I cannot join in my colleagues’ conclusion that the exclusion of Dr. Breithaupt’s testimony was harmless. Far from possessing “minimal probative value” (maj. opn., ante, at p. 323), his testimony could well have made the difference in the jurors’ determination whether the complainant’s account was sufficiently reliable to sustain a guilty verdict.
This was not an easy or straightforward case. The jury deliberated for a day. That fact alone should preclude any suggestion that the outcome would not have been affected by evidence casting doubt on the whole of the complainant’s testimony. At best the conviction rests on equivocal and highly inferential evidence, i.e., that the complainant was “out of it” but remembered just enough to know that she did not consent to anything. Indeed her testimony even on that point conflicted with her early statement to police, whom she told that she might have gotten into the car with defendant under her own power because he said he would take her to her friends. The complainant obviously had a very strong motive to deny that she willingly accompanied a complete stranger in circumstances that her friends and family would surely think made her conduct extraordinarily reckless at best. There is little question that she was either too drunk to know what she was doing, or too drunk to remember what she had done. Dr. Breithaupt’s testimony, in light of the other evidence, could very well have persuaded jurors that the latter possibility was at least as likely as the former, or at any rate likely enough to leave a reasonable doubt about the accuracy of her version of events.
*344The complainant’s testimony was vulnerable on a number of other points. I have already alluded to the fact that no one—neither her barhopping companions, nor the Samaritans who drove her home from the motel—could corroborate her testimony that she was “out of it,” intermittently or otherwise. Much was made at trial of her testimony that she was vomiting throughout the period in question. However, the only corroboration for this testimony was the presence of her DNA on the passenger door of defendant’s car. This may indeed have been the most incriminating evidence in the entire case—or would have been, had the case been fairly tried. But a properly educated jury would have known that someone who drank as much as the complainant had drunk might well pass from a state of active but blacked-out consciousness to a state of stupor at any time. Thus, assuming her vomiting out the window tended to reflect a stuporous state—a supposition for which there appears to be no distinct evidentiary basis—it was still compatible with an inference that she entered the car during a blacked-out state rather than a stuporous one. And on the prosecution theory as argued to the jury, that possibility, if substantial enough to raise a reasonable doubt, required an acquittal.
The complainant’s attempts to portray herself as nauseated (and by implication, stuporous or protostuporous) at earlier points in the evening were uncorroborated at best, and compromised at worst. Thus she testified that she first threw up when she and her companions visited one of the bars’ restrooms. But neither of them saw this happen. She was apparently not vomiting after her encounter with defendant, while riding away from the motel with her two benefactors. Apart from the DNA evidence, there is apparently no independent evidence of vomiting until the next day, when she was observed to visit the restroom for that purpose at the police station.4
The complainant also testified that the recollection of her abductor touching her breast first came to her as a “flashback” at the police station the next day; she “didn’t remember it at first” but only “remembered it after.” The two men who gave her a ride described her making statements that she herself had no recollection of making, including that she had been kidnapped when she went outside to talk on her phone, a statement that conflicts with at least two other accounts she gave. A jury exposed to Breithaupt’s testimony could find these fragmentary and shifting memories consistent with the hypothesis that blacked-out gaps in her memory were being filled in after the fact with confabulated details. It seems plain to me that exposure of the jurors to that testimony would have been reasonably likely to produce a verdict more favorable to defendant.
*345Conclusion
The only real question in this case was whether the complainant was too drunk to do anything, or too drunk to remember what she did. The prosecution was permitted to present a picture in which she was too drunk to do anything most of the time, but not so drunk that she could not accurately report damning recollections on particular highly incriminating points. The defense was entitled to present expert testimony that would cast serious doubt on both of these propositions. The exclusion of that testimony was an abuse of discretion. It cannot be dismissed as harmless. I believe it requires reversal of the judgment. I therefore respectfully dissent.
A petition for a rehearing was denied September 1, 2009, and appellant’s petition for review by the Supreme Court was denied November 10, 2009, S176210. Kennard, J., Werdegar, J., and Corrigan, J., were of the opinion that the petition should be granted.

I must also distance myself from the majority’s conclusion that defendant waived his federal constitutional objections by failing to raise them in the trial court. (Maj. opn., ante, at p. 320, fn. 10.) The gist of this charge of error is that the trial court’s ruling so fundamentally and unjustifiably crippled the defense as to deny defendant’s federal constitutional right to a fair trial. The primary if not only reason for raising this issue here is to preserve it for possible assertion in another forum. Defendant has raised it seasonably by asserting it in this court. The majority opinion’s statement to the contrary is unnecessary to the present decision since the majority finds neither error nor prejudice. Its declaration of a procedural forfeiture can have no effect unless it is to cut off defendant’s right to seek relief in another tribunal. I see no reason for such a declaration, and I would therefore not subscribe to it even if I agreed with the majority’s analysis on the other issues discussed.
Moreover I must disagree with the majority’s conclusion on the merits of this issue. The rule on which it rests does not appear in any of the authorities cited. Only one of them is concerned with the erroneous exclusion of evidence, and it only requires that the proponent “ma[k]e known to the court” the “substance, purpose, and relevance” of the proffered evidence. (Evid. Code, § 354, subd. (a), italics added.) The other cited authorities are concerned with error in the admission of evidence. (Evid. Code, § 353 [requiring predicate objection for appellate challenge]; People v. Mattson (1990) 50 Cal.3d 826, 853-854 [268 Cal.Rptr. 802,789 P.2d 983] [applying requirement of predicate objection to federal exclusionary rules].) Some decisions in automatic appeals suggest that a defendant will not be heard to argue, for the first time on appeal, that the exclusion of evidence in compliance with state law violated a federal constitutional mandate. (People v. Gordon (1990) 50 Cal.3d 1223, 1264-1265 [270 Cal.Rptr. 451, 792 P.2d 251], citing Lorenzana v. Superior Court (1973) 9 Cal.3d 626, 640 [108 Cal.Rptr. 585, 511 P.2d 33]; People v. Smithey (1999) 20 Cal.4th 936, 995 [86 Cal.Rptr.2d 243, 978 P.2d 1171].) It is somewhat difficult to square these holdings with the mandate of Evidence Code section 354, subdivision (a), but whatever their soundness in context, I would not extend them to cases where the evidence is excluded, as I conclude it was here, in violation of state law.

 “The use of force by this man. If he put his hand on her at all on the way to the car, that’s an application of physical force. You may say, well, that won’t be that much force, but it’s enough to an unresisting person who is wasted, totally intoxicated, out of her mind. That’s enough force, [¶] Ask yourself this. Why would he have to drive the car over to where she is in the alley if she could get up and walk on her own to his car? Why would he have to drive the car over? Why? Number one, she couldn’t move. He had to put her in the car. Number two, if he was carrying her across the whole parking lot, he would be more likely to be caught before he got there.” (Italics added.)
“She just knows that she ended up in his car. She testified that she didn’t remember how she got to the car. She does remember that she didn’t walk. She doesn’t remember walking. She told you what she was like in the alley and in the car; unable to move.” (Italics added.)
Similarly, in settling jury instructions the prosecutor argued, “The only reasonable inference to be drawn from all of the evidence we have heard is that she was moved by the defendant to his car. Whether he put her over his shoulder, whether he assisted her by carrying her one arm around his shoulders, whether he picked her up like a baby, or whether he dragged her, okay, she got to the alley then that was it.”

 And we were forced to contend, as the trial court was not, with pervasive mistranscriptions, most notably of Dr. Breithaupt’s repeated references to era bloc amnesia, which is never transcribed correctly, but appears variously as “on block,” “unblock," and perhaps most entertainingly, “embolic.”

 A jury already questioning the complainant’s account might well wonder why, if her condition were as bad as she described, no evidence was presented that she had vomited on her clothes.