Court Opinion

ID: 9756137
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-28 21:09:35.024137+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T09:56:12.826594
License: Public Domain

HUTCHINSON, Justice,
concurring.
I join the majority but write separately to emphasize my view that the “forcible compulsion” which distinguishes “Rape” in 18 Pa.C.S. § 3121 from “Statutory Rape” in 18 Pa.C.S. § 3122 is present whenever a victim’s governing self-direction is lost. On all the evidence in this record, including the victim’s age and injuries, a jury was entitled to infer such compulsion. Certainly, if a grown man can be coerced or compelled to confess to a crime by the questioning of an arresting officer, see Culombe v. Connecticut, 367 U.S. 568, 602, 81 S.Ct. 1860, 1879, 6 L.Ed.2d 1037 (1961), an eight year old victim of a sexual assault is no less likely to have had her will forcibly overcome by an adult male in the dirty, bare and unfamiliar place in which this crime took place. It is, indeed, time for us to apply to the victims of crime the same protective standards that we give criminal defendants.