OSLO (Reuters) - A Norwegian court has acquitted a man accused of raping a sleeping woman after he said he was also asleep at the time.

The 18-year old woman, who had gone to sleep dressed in trousers and a sweater on a sofa after a party with friends, awoke to find the 34-year-old man having sex with her. The man said he was woken by her screams for help.

"He said that he was asleep and the majority of the judges found that they could not rule out the possibility," defense lawyer Christian Riig told NRK public radio on Thursday.

The three-judge panel in the court in Inderoy, west Norway, acquitted him by a 2-1 margin because of doubts about whether he had been conscious.

Riig declined to speculate about how the man, who had been drinking, could have had sex in his sleep, apparently after undressing the woman. But he said an ex-partner of the man had testified by telephone that similar things had happened to her.

© Reuters 2004. All Rights Reserved.

[ 12-09-2004, 06:12 PM: Message edited by: Dreamer128 ]

I watched a show on Discovery once, about people with sleep disorders. There were people there who were beating their spouses in their sleep, breaking stuff in the room, and once somebody even stabbed a person in their sleep. They were all really traumatised because of this (both the person that got beaten and the sleeping person).

They showed recordings of what happens at night when they sleep (when they were alone, of course, and under surveillance), and they really did weird stuff around the room in their sleep... It's a bad sleeping disorder. So it's possible he really was asleep. [img]graemlins/uhoh1.gif[/img]

Maybe he just dreamed it. ;) :D

wow.. that's weird...scary even...XD

There was a story over here in Australia about a woman who each night roamed the streets of sydney in in sleep having sex with people.

Sounds like something similar.

So I guess a person's sex drive is actually in their subconcious? [img]graemlins/1ponder.gif[/img]

Weird. Kind of worries me though, considering I have a bad sleeping disorder that revolves around depression, think I sleep walked once because of it.

I have heard of weird excuses for a crime but this one is the worst... how the hell do you undress another person when you are asleep?

If I had been that judge he would have goten a triple live prison, two for raping the girl, one for lying to the court...

and few extra years for being a norwegian but thats a diffrent issue .

This is what bothers me. Are you not also responsible for your subconscious actions?

BTW, this seems pretty intense for GD. Consider moving to CE?

..guess we'll never really know the truth..

Hey Guys,

I'm going to move this over to Current Events. This type of discussion is a bit heavy for the GD part of the forum

Cheers!

[ 12-09-2004, 10:26 PM: Message edited by: T-D-C ]

Thanks, T-D-C [img]graemlins/thumbsup.gif[/img]

Again, his excuse is obviously BS, but this sets an odd precedent:

Are we responsible for our subconscious acts? What about drunken ones? High ones? Ones while we were stressed out?

It seems that more and more excuses are being taken into consideration.

1. I was stressed
2. She prevoked me (relating to a downgrade from a murder charge to a manslaughter charge in the paper the other day)
3. I was alseep
4. I was mentally ill.

So many judges are looking at these excuses and letting people off or downgrading there charges.

When is it going to stop

Ahhh Mr Judge I didn't mean to kill her just wound her. Ok then here is a suspended sentance.

On the other hand, some of these matter. Some of these genuinely affect who 'you' are and how you make decisions. It'd be nice to see documented evidence of what people in general can do while asleep, and what this fellow in particular may have done in the past.

We can't have systems of justice that ignore mitigating factors, but we can't have one that absolves all cases with mitigating factors either. I guess that's the price of having actual justice.

Getting high is a terrible excuse, because it's almost always a choice to do so.

Of course, we're talking about different regions of the world and different legal systems. As for claiming mental illness, in the US, pleading insanity is a really risky legal tactic. It almost never works, and when it does the sentence is much longer than it would otherwise be.

The key word is mitigating, i.e. milder or less severe.

Should aquittal even be an option here? That he raped the young girl is not even disputed, only his ability to prevent himself from doing so.

Whether it's his fault or not is really not relevant. He is still a menace to society, and must be prevented from ever doing this.

I'm not talking about punitive justice -- I'm not sure it even exists in any morally sound sense. The only point of law is to protect people from other people.

Agreed Aleph. Mine was more of a general comment.

In this case, full aquittal seems a strange precedent, since he did actually do it. The woman's rights were trampled on.

And if his old girlfriend was telling the truth, he's got a habit of this...

<font face="Verdana" size="3" color="#00FF00">Some people just need to be handcuffed to the bed when they sleep.</font>

[ 12-10-2004, 10:52 AM: Message edited by: pritchke ]