Court Opinion

ID: 9853958
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-09-24 05:58:20.546934+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T09:20:24.344990
License: Public Domain

McDEVITT, Justice,
specially concurring:
I am writing to concur in the majority view that there is no mistake of fact defense to the crime of statutory rape relating to the age of the complainant. There is, however, another predicate upon which to arrive at this result which should be aired.
There is a principle fundamental to our system of criminal law that the intent to commit a crime is a prerequisite to a finding of guilt and imposition of punishment. This principle “is as universal and persistent in mature systems of law as belief in freedom of the human will and a consequent ability and duty of the normal individual to choose between good and evil.” Morissette v. United States, 342 U.S. 246, 250, 72 S.Ct. 240, 243, 96 L.Ed. 288 (1952). This notion is reflected in the Idaho Code, which makes a person incapable of committing a crime where that person is laboring under ignorance or a mistake of fact “which disproves any criminal intent.” I.C. § 18-201(1). The appellant cites this provision in support of his argument that his reasonable mistake as to the complainant’s age serves to exculpate him of the crime of statutory rape.
However, statutory rape is a crime that has long been recognized as an exception to the concept that a criminal accused must harbor an intent to commit every element of the crime charged. When the legislature
borrows terms of art in which are accumulated the legal tradition and meaning of centuries of practice, it presumably knows and adopts the cluster of ideas that were attached to each borrowed word in the body of learning from which it was taken and the meaning its use will convey to the judicial mind unless otherwise instructed. In such a case, absence of contrary direction may be taken as satisfaction with widely accepted definitions, not as a departure from them.
Morissette v. United States, 342 U.S. at 263, 72 S.Ct. at 250. See also Lorillard v. Pons, 434 U.S. 575, 583, 98 S.Ct. 866, 871, 55 L.Ed.2d 40 (1978) (“ ‘[Wjhere words are employed in a statute which had at the time a well-known meaning at common law or in the law of this country, they are presumed to have been used in that sense unless the context compels the contrary.’ ”).
Over the course of American legal history, many have asserted a reasonable mistake of fact as to the complainant’s age as a defense to the charge. This argument has been repeatedly rejected. See State v. Ruhl, 8 Iowa 447 (1859); Beckham v. Nacke, 56 Mo. 546 (1874); State v. Newton, 44 Iowa 45 (1876); Lawrence v. Commonwealth, 30 Gratt. 845 (1878); State v. Griffith, 67 Mo. 287 (1878); Heath v. State, 173 Ind. 296, 90 N.E. 310 (1910); State v. Wade, 224 N.C. 760, 32 S.E.2d 314 (1944); Commonwealth v. Sarricks, 161 Pa.Super. 577, 56 A.2d 323 (1948); State v. Superior Court of Pima County, 104 Ariz. 440, 454 P.2d 982 (1969); Nelson v. Moriarty, 484 F.2d 1034 (1st Cir.1973); People v. Cash, 419 Mich. 230, 351 N.W.2d 822 (1984).
Thus, I am persuaded that the legislature, in codifying the crime of statutory rape, intended to incorporate the immemorial tradition of the common law that a mistake of fact as to the complainant’s age is no defense.