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On 23 April 2016, the investigative journalism web site Oklahoma Watch reported on a March 2016 decision handed down by the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals regarding a lower court's earlier decision not to try a rape case due to the circumstances of the case and the provisions of the state's rape laws. The case in question pertained to an incident that took place in the early morning hours of 1 June 2014 at a Tulsa park involving a then 16-year-old female victim (whose blood-alcohol level was later measured at .341) and a then 17-year-old male classmate. The defendant in the case transported the intoxicated teenaged girl to her grandmother's home, after which family members took her to a local hospital, where sexual assault examination allegedly revealed the presence of the male teenager's DNA on her person in a manner that suggested oral sexual relations (female on male) had occurred while the girl was heavily intoxicated or unconscious. Oklahoma Watch reported that criminal charges were initially brought against the juvenile male, but those charges were eventually dismissed due to discrepancies between reported versions of events and the wording of Oklahoma's rape laws: After the charges were dismissed, the criminal appellate court heard a state prosecutors' appeal of the dismissal, and on 24 March 2016 the appellate court affirmed the lower court's November 2015 decision [PDF]. In that unpublished opinion (not intended to set a legal precedent), the court of appeals ruled that the standard of evidence for the criminal charges brought by the prosecutor could not be met under the provisions of existing Oklahoma laws pertaining to rape and forcible sodomy, and they declined to find in favor of the prosecution for circumstances clearly uncovered by law: As the appellate court noted, the specific crime of sodomy in the state of Oklahoma (codified as a detestable and abominable crime against nature) details five specific conditions under which a suspect may be charged with that crime: As the appellate court noted, intoxication was not one of the five very specific requirements encompassed by that law. The court's opinion held that the State's proposition of error was to try to include intoxication as a circumstance under which sodomy charges could be brought, which was not legally feasible under Oklahoma's extant forcible sodomy law. Ben Fu, the prosecutor who argued this case before the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals, told us that the the Court had previously held that the inability to consent was equivalent to the use of force for the purposes of forcible sodomy, but they decided to disregard their own precedent without comment in this case. Many aggregated reports maintained that Oklahoma courts had ruled (or that Oklahoma laws held) an assault could not be considered rape if the victim was intoxicated. That was false: Oklahoma rape laws specifically allow for intoxication to be a circumstance under which vaginal and anal sexual contact may be considered rape. However, those laws also differentiate between oral sexual contact and other forms of sexual contact, with forcible oral copulation falling under the legal category of forcible sodomy: Even legal analysts who disagreed with the court's ruling in theory acknowledged that it was congruent with existing sexual assault laws in Oklahoma. Two sexual assault law experts told The Guardian that the problem lies not with the decision of the appellate court, but rather with the wording of sexual assault laws in the state of Oklahoma: As Oklahoma Watch originally reported, the case was so highly controversial because most parties believed that some sort of criminal charge ought to have applied to the incident. Oklahoma State Rep. Scott Biggs has since proposed fixing the statute to define forcible sodomy in a way that includes unconscious victims.
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