The Fantasy of the Unchaste Mentality: North Carolina’s Illusory Exception to the Rape-Shield Rule

Introduction

Abstract

For the past forty years, North Carolina’s rape-shield legislation has served as a laboratory of experimentation. Like the rape-shield legislation of every state, it generally prevents the admission of complaining witnesses’ past sexual history in sexual assault prosecutions. However, North Carolina’s rape-shield rule contains a unique exception not found elsewhere in the country. The exception, which we label the “fantasy exception,” permits the admission of a complaining witness’s past sexual behavior when it is offered as the basis of expert psychological or psychiatric opinion that the complainant fantasized or invented the charged assault.

This Article is the first to rigorously scrutinize the fantasy exception. We conclude that the North Carolina experiment has failed. The fantasy exception’s potential policy justifications range from misogynistic at worst to unsound at best. In its application, the fantasy exception fails to confer any positive protections to criminal defendants yet carries the potential to confuse and intimidate sexual assault victims. In such a sensitive area of the law that especially needs clear and logical rules, the fantasy exception only harms; it never helps. In short, other jurisdictions should continue to avoid the fantasy exception, and North Carolina should remove it from its rape-shield legislation.

Suggested Reading

Andrew Michaels∞ I. Introduction II. The Court’s Death Penalty And Categorical-Exemption Jurisprudence A. Atkins and Roper: The Court’s Articulation of the Two-Part Test for Categorical Exemption  B. Graham: Finding a National Consensus Against a Punishment Based Solely on the Rarity of its Implementation  III. Why

Triangulated civil suits as opposed to criminal prosecutions can serve as an important avenue for redress for sexual harms.