Does anyone know what prevalence is of alcohol-induced amnesia. Not saying anything about this case directly, but I've never suffered it, and tend to think that some/many people use it as a "plausible excuse" for something they subsequently regret.
I think I've told this story on this forum before, but I've certainly experienced this multiple times (not that I remember it
) One year in college I started drinking early one day during orientation week (when most upperclassmen are all in town, but classes haven't started because Freshmen are undergoing orientation), and blacked out by the early afternoon. However I was apparently up and about late into the night. Throughout the rest of the semester, I would keep meeting people I didn't know, but who knew me, and I'd had long conversations with that night. None of them had any clue I'd been blacked out, nor did I seem sloppy drunk to any of them.
The key thing, in my opinion, is that if someone is too drunk to consent, it doesn't matter if they are blacked out. You should be able to tell either way. If some girl hooked up with me that night, I think she would have been perfectly justified in thinking I was capable of consenting, based on the reconstruction of my mental state from what other people have said. However there have been other times I've been blackout drunk where it is clear I not only blacked out, but was a puddle. Anyone interacting with me could tell I was way too far gone to remotely have consensual sex.
All that being said, I would say the experience I described in my first paragraph is much less common than the experience I just described. There have been maybe 10-15 total times I have blacked out in my life, and as far as I know only like 3 have been "high functioning" blackouts. The fact of the matter is a blackout usually requires a high spike in BAC, which generally means getting sloppy drunk.
I'm not sure what that has to do with the OP though. It sounded to me like the woman in this case wasn't simply blacked out, but practically passed out while sexual interaction continued. That isn't some sort of grey area. Even if you think the guys mental state was mitigating (which I don't necessarily), the production team's mental state certainly wasn't. Can you be charged with something like accessory to sexual assault?
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