Court Opinion

ID: 9723892
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-26 10:37:25.77206+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:24:53.129832
License: Public Domain

SNELL, Justice
(dissenting).
I respectfully dissent.
Defendant’s motion for judgment of acquittal should have been granted as a matter of law. A “sex act” or “sexual activity” as defined by section 702.17 was not committed by defendant because there was no sexual contact between him and the victim.
The majority relies on State v. Pearson, decided this month, from which I dissented, as authority for its result. In Pearson, where no one disputed that sex was involved, the majority found that because the act was sexual in nature, contact occurred. A gratuitous statement of law was then adopted, although completely extraneous to the facts of the case and without any supporting authority, that a sexual motivation is not necessary for a sex act to 00010:. Thus, the aura of sex controls the meaning of “contact” and causes motivation to disappear.
In the instant case, the antithesis of Pearson, it is undisputed that sex is not involved. Nevertheless, a sexual abuse is held to be possible because under Pearson, a sexual motivation is not required. The unfounded dicta of Pearson is now bootstrapped into a holding of law that decides the instant case.
The holdings in State v. Pearson and State v. Monk have transformed our sex abuse statutes into general assault statutes where the assault has some effect on the reproductive or excretory organs of the victim or defendant. I believe these constructions of our statutes are unwise and go well beyond any recognizable legislative intent to protect victims against sex abuse.