Sex Crimes Attorney in Minneapolis, Minnesota

Criminal Sexual Misconduct

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In Minnesota, rape, child molesting, sexual assault – is what they call it in other states – are all codified in the criminal sexual conduct statutes, and so any sort of sexual assault is a level of criminal sexual conduct, and we have five degrees: first, second, third, fourth, and fifth degree. The first four are felonies. The last, fifth degree, is a gross misdemeanor.

And so it is impossible to, in a sound byte, go through those, ’cause they’re really quite complex, but essentially, we have two kinds of sexual assaults in the state of – really, at common law around the country and in the state of – one would be what we think of as forcible rapes, and the other would be assaults where the victim is incapable of consent, usually because of age, but it could be because they’re intoxicated or because they have a cognitive disability.

And so in Minnesota, we have criminal sexual conduct in the first, second, third, fourth, and fifth degree, and if we start with the most serious, first degree, there are many, many, many different ways that that law can be violated. It can be the forcible rape of an adult victim with a weapon or it can be sexual penetration of a child under the age of 13. There are many other – there are many variations having to do with positions of authority or significant relationships and the like, but as a general rule, and not always, but as a general rule in Minnesota, first and third degree are penetration offenses – having – and it could be rapes as well as child molesting cases – and second and fourth degree are contact cases; that is, it didn’t go all the way to penetration. And so – and fifth degree, the gross misdemeanor, is more for what we call “groping cases,” and in fact, when I started practicing law and was prosecuting these cases, there was no fifth degree statute, and we found that there was nothing to be done with people that came alongside somebody in the mall or in a public place and groped them inappropriately. This statute was passed, and it’s criminal sexual conduct in the fifth degree.

So that’s – each statute needs to be read carefully and examined against the facts of the particular accusation. That’s what the police do when they hear an accusation – they go to the statutes – that’s what the prosecutors do, and that’s what we do by the time it gets to us to be defended.

Minneapolis criminal defense attorney Kevin Short defines criminal sexual conduct.

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