Determining Consent – Keeping Yourself Safe From Allegations When it comes to hiring a team to defend you when you are facing charges for committing a sex crime, there is hardly any more efficient and successful team to turn to than the team of leading sex crime lawyers in Rhode Island at John Grasso.
These legal experts warn that you should never underestimate the urgency to reach out to a trusted and reputable legal professional when you are facing charges of this kind. Sex crime charges are extremely serious and can result in several years of imprisonment. However, while any sex crime is a horrendous act, there is also an alarmingly high number of sex crime complaints which are nothing more than false allegations. Once you are accused of such a crime it can be extremely difficult to prove your innocence. Yet, the team states that the number of sex crime charges will drop if the wider public enjoys a greater awareness of what the legislative system regards as sex crimes. They explain that the keyword in many of these cases is often consent and whether consent was present at the time. Yet, the state of Rhode Island doesn’t define the word consent and this absence of clarity makes it even harder to prove your innocence in court. They further expand on the fact that the local legal system has shifted its focus onto situations where consent was absent rather than defining the term. Thus, consent would be absent in any of the following scenarios and if you do tread onto these grounds, you do open yourself to the possibility of having a sex crime charge against your name. The first determining factor would be if the person that you are planning to be sexually active with is younger than 16 years of age. Nobody under the age of 16 can have sex legally in the state of RI. Consent is also excluded from the following scenarios. When the victim is mentally incapacitated or disabled or even physically disabled. Any kind of disability would entail that the victim was not in a position where they can provide consent for any kind of sexual activity. If there was any form of coercion or force involved, the authorities would immediately remove consent from the table as a possible reason for the sexual misconduct to have taken place. Then when there was an element of surprise. Any effort where the victim was overcome by force or threatened with a weapon or even threats of harm to either the victim self or loved ones of the victim, the court would immediately consider the act as a sex crime.