Too much of what we got from the Legislature this year was garbage. Wingnut Republican priorities are the only things that really matter to them, and we got a lot of it. But some decent things made it through, and we should take note of it when that does happen. Here’s one example.
[Last] week, the Summer Willis Act took effect.
Before Sept. 1, the state’s sexual assault laws only defined what was not consent via a list of 14 scenarios, such as cases where a perpetrator uses or threatens “physical force, violence, or coercion,” or intentionally incapacitates someone “by administering any substance without the other person’s knowledge.” The law also defined assault in terms of power dynamics, recognizing instances in which healthcare professionals, coaches, tutors, and clergymen wield coercion tactics.
But even as advocates, lawmakers, and prosecutors fought to expand the state’s definition of assault over time, the enumerations weren’t comprehensive. And if a victim’s sexual assault didn’t fall neatly within the statute’s lines, their case would be that much more difficult to prosecute.
Like Summer Willis’s.
In 2014, as a sophomore at University of Texas at Austin, Willis was raped at a college. The assault, like countless others, fell within a loophole: Because she was drugged by one attacker and raped by another, none of the 14 specific “non-consent” clauses applied to her.
“What happened to me, the rape that changed me, that haunted me, and nearly broke me, wasn’t even considered rape in Texas,” Willis said in her March 25 testimony to the House Committee on Criminal Jurisprudence. “The law didn’t recognize my assault.”
Now, prosecutors are ready to test it in court.
“We know it when we see it,” prosecutor Janna Oswald, division chief of the Adult Sex Crimes Division in Harris County, told The Barbed Wire. “When you hear a fact pattern of sexual assault, you say, ‘Yeah, she didn’t consent. That was rape.’ And then (needing to take) whatever that fact pattern is and being like, ‘Okay, was she intoxicated? Did he use force? Physical force? Was he unaware that she was unaware?’”
Such legal hoop-jumping, Oswald said, makes prosecuting assault “very difficult, sometimes.”
“It would just be nice to say ‘she didn’t consent,’ and then be able to present the fact pattern to a jury, and they say: ‘She didn’t consent, therefore it is sexual assault.’”
It’s a long story and it’s very much worth your time to read it, so go do that. What happened to Summer Willis was a crime no matter what the law at the time said, but now it’s a crime for real. As awful as that was for her, that this bill finally passed is a good thing. Kudos to her and to the legislators who got it done.