State v. Yanez

I respectfully dissent. I cannot believe that the Legislature intended that G.L.1956 § 11-37-8.1 (Rhode Island’s statutory-rape law) — carrying a mandatory-minimum sentence of twenty years in jail — should be construed by the Judiciary to bar an accused teenager’s reasonable mistake-of-age defense to charges based upon his engaging in consensual sexual acts with his teenaged girlfriend. The unavoidable result of such a draconian interpretation of this law is the imposition on this defendant, Alejandro Ya-nez (Alex) — a young man who was barely eighteen years old at the time of this incident —…