Category: Let's talk
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1360801/Haydor-Khan-cleared-rape-climbing-wrong-bed.html
Basically, for those who don't want to read the link, the individual concerned got drunk, ended up going back to the wrong hotel room and started having sex with a sleeping woman who he claims he thought to be his girlfriend. When she woke up he grabbed her mobile phone and ran away, but was arrested and then subsequently charged with rape.
He was later cleared of rape by a jury on the basis he was too drunk to realise that he had got into the wrong bed with the wrong woman. The fact he had had sex with a sleeping woman who was not in a position to have given consent has seemingly not been taken into account.
Moreover, the article specifically states that his girlfriend had previously told him that she was not in the mood for sex as she was feeling ill. Therefore, it should already have been assumed that there was a lack of consent on the part of his girlfriend, so even if he'd got into bed with "the right woman" and started having sex with her, it would surely still have been rape.
For me this raises a huge amount of questions.
If a person gets drunk and gets into a car, drives home, hits someone on the way home and kills them, they are held accountable for their actions.
Even if that drunk driver is pulled over and breath-tested, they are charged with driving under the influence and can receive a large fine and a driving ban or both.
So why is it that a drunk man can get into bed with a woman, start having sex with her, and not be held accountable for that?
Yet again a man has got away with rape on the basis that a jury somehow feel that he wasn't responsible for his actions.
And what of the woman he raped? Where is her justice? She was entitled to not have been violated; a man had sex with her against her will, and yet this fact is seemingly irelevant.
And given the girlfriend had explicitly stated she did not want sex earlier in the evening, there was no consent even from the right woman. So why is who the man had sex with important here?
Since when did having non consentual sex with a partner not equal rape?
And since when did consuming enough alcohol that you cannot distinguish whether the woman you are having sex with is actually your girlfriend mean that it's ok to rape a woman.
If a woman gets drunk and is raped, more often than not she is told that it is her fault for getting into such a state that she could not be in a position to give consent or otherwise.
So why is this different for a man?
I'd have the same questions about this as you have. Rape is rape, and even if his girlfriend did want sex that night, the fact still is that he had sex with someone (the other woman) without her consent which would still be rape. That may not have been his intention to have sex with the wrong woman, but neither is it someone's intention to hit a pedestrian while driving drunk. It's an unfortunate mistake for the drunk/high person and a possible consequence to being under the influence of a substance, but it has still seriously affected someone else's life. It's just ridiculous that he's not getting some kind of legal penalty for what he did to that woman.
Not only that but the idiot chose, CHOSE, to get drunk in the first place.
Exactly. I don't accept this: "Sorry, I (he/she) was drunk" as a reason for criminal-type behavior. It is true that people usually do things they otherwise wouldn't do if they hadn't been high/drunk, but unless they were literally forced or tricked into it by another person or have a real condition where they honestly don't understand the consequences of what they're doing, it was his choice to drink that much, and everyone knows that drinking changes one's behavior/ability to think straight to some point. I guess I'd think less harshly about this if it was the person's first time drinking and they didn't know how the alcohol/drug would affect him/her (not saying what he did would be OK still), but, I don't know, I honestly don't see the point of getting that far gone in the first place that you don't know or remember what you did, even if nothing like this ends up happening.
Exactly. And people wonder why I don't get into that crap.
Sounds like recently when some bleeding hearts in U S were bleating a man in Texas was executed even though he was innocent of the murder he was charged. Turns out the yuck killed his cellmate in prison by setting the man on fire. OK so he didn't kill someone in a robbery, I believe the circumstance was, but he was allowed to be paroled even after incinerating his cellmate, who, even as a prisoner, was still a human being. Why not make the execution about him? Can you claim intoxication as a defense in U K? I believe it was made invalid as a defense in U S some years ago.
Wow this whole thing is ridiculous. And I wonder... How did he get into the wrong hotel room? If the door was locked and she was sleeping, she couldn't have let him in. I lived in the UK but never went to a hotel there. In the US and Canada at least, hotel doors lock automaticly when closed. This is all besides the point but I'm curious all the same. and yes, he should have been charged and should be serving a prison sentence right now.
And aside from all that, the article is poorly written.
Never been in the U K, but don't some of the American chains exist overseas as well? At hotels here door locks are opened on a card system, where you have to have a card that's programmed to open that particular lock, slide it in to be read by a scanner. Unless he had some version of a "master key", how did he unlock the wrong door? Truth really is stranger than fiction.
Yeah. Going into the wrong hotel room doesn't make sense to me, unless he knocked, and the woman opened it, thinking it was someone else. O yeah, that's right. She was sleeping. Either way, this whole thing is just wrong. Drunkenness, like people have said, is no excuse for murder, so why can it be an excuse for rape?
This is an outrage, and I feel terrible for the woman who was violated while sleeping. I hate when alcohol is used so that someone doesn't have to take responsibility for their own action. I have a problem with people not taking responsibility for their own actions in general, but particularly when it comes to crap like this.
However, the last few posters did raise a good point. How the hell did this guy get into the wrong room anyway? Claire, is there something different about hotels in the UK than there is here?
This is insane. And think of the message this type of story sends. All someone has to do is say "I was drunk and I shot the wrong person" or "I was drunk and I stabbed the wrong person" or "I was drunk and I robbed the wrong person" Well you get the point. Its ridiculous!
As for how he got into the wrong room in the first place I don't understand that either.
That's true. HOw the hell did he even manage to get into the wrong room in the first place? And now that that's happened it's gonna open the door for every criminal to use drunkenness and whhatnot asa defense.
I don't take being drunk as an excuse for bad behavior, and he should have received some jail time, not prison, since she's not dead, or anything, but she was violated, so sure some time should have been given. But I'm like everyone else? How did he get in to the room anyway? Maybe this article was written and is false?
Yeah, it certainly throws a wrench into the gears. Interestingly, they totally avoided that bit of info in the article.
He had sex with the woman without her consent and to me that is rape. I don't know what this jury was thinking. Twelve of them and that's their verdict.
I also don't know why the woman didn't lock her room so drunk men couldn't randomly enter it. Of course the rape is no less wrong because the room was unlocked.
That's the hing though. Nowadays it seems that most hotel room doors, at least those with the key card system, lock automatically when closed. Furthermore I think they're weighted so they close and engage fully when they doo. So I too wonder about this business.