Court Opinion

ID: 9464688
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-04 23:40:01.825192+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:38:45.821794
License: Public Domain

LEVIN H. CAMPBELL, Circuit Judge
(dissenting).
I strongly disagree with the court’s opinion insofar as it suggests that Balthazar and the public generally lacked fair notice that nonconsenting fellatio and oral/anal sex acts were proscribed. In Jacquith v. Commonwealth, 331 Mass. 439, 120 N.E.2d 189 (1954), the statute was judicially construed to forbid “illicit sexual relations, and infamous conduct which is lustful, obscene, and in deviation of accepted customs and manners.” Surely nonconsenting fellatio and oral/anal sex acts come within that definition if any conduct does. Indeed, one can venture to suggest that any sane person would know that such nonconsensual acts were forbidden, just as he would known that highway robbery, piracy and murder are forbidden. Since the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court has limited the statute to nonconsensual acts, and since, so limited, it is certainly constitutional as the court concedes, see Rose v. Locke, 423 U.S. 48, 96 S.Ct. 243, 46 L.Ed.2d 185 (1975), I find much of the court’s rationale puzzling.
The difficulty here, as I see it, is not that defendant would not know that to force a person to engage in such unnatural sex acts was criminal. Rather the difficulty is that his counsel and the judge were not in a position when the ease was tried to know that non-consent was an essential element of the offense, the Supreme Judicial Court not yet having spoken. Accordingly, the judge, did not instruct the jury to this effect, and defense counsel did not, we are told, defend explicitly on the ground of consent. It is thus possible that the jury— which acquitted defendant of assault — convicted him under the unnatural acts statute without finding that he forced the victim. I realize that the Supreme Judicial Court considered and rejected this possibility, but it seems to me that the record does not warrant its confidence in this regard. It is fundamental that an accused is entitled to know in advance the elements of the offense so that he can prepare a defense, and that he go to the jury on proper instructions. I therefore believe that fundamental fairness requires that defendant be afforded a new trial. But I see no need to vacate the conviction, and bar reprosecuting as the court does in affirming the district court.