[aerostable_slug]

In California, rape of an unconscious person is not considered a violent felony for the purposes of 'strikes' as well as early release from prison. A rapist may serve as little as 50% of their sentence due to this fact.

It was only this year (2025) that rape of an unconscious person who was made unconscious by the assailant (a date rape drug provision like Germany's) became a violent felony. Germany is not alone in these types of reclassifications.

[squigz]

So if they're unconscious for some other reason - or the assailant wasn't the one who drugged them - it's not a felony?

Sometimes I'm still surprised at how politicians can defend certain positions.

[aerostable_slug]

> Sometimes I'm still surprised at how politicians can defend certain positions.

Well, the people who opposed it were widely decried as racist.

It's pretty easy to push things past the public when the press is complicit and the opposition is tarred and feathered as evil oppressors.

[voxic11]

It's still a felony, just not classified as a "violent" one for the purposes of strikes/early release.

[scarmig]

In California, attacking someone with a knife, solicitation of murder, and shooting a gun at someone in their car are all nonviolent felonies.

I'm happy--indeed eager--to have all of these (correctly) classified as violent felonies. But there's simply the matter of public opinion and how much space in state prisons there is. If we hold prison capacity constant, increasing the severity of punishment of one crime necessarily decreases the severity of punishment of other crimes.

[defrost]

The US has a lot of people in prison for "Felony Murder" .. being loosely connected to a crime in which someone dies.

This isn't even a crime in many other countries, the UK, Australia, for example.

Those countries charge people for their actions, not the actions of others.

In the US you have people on long sentences for Felony Murder because as teenagers they and friends broke into a house to rob it, and had one of the group shot by police, home owners, security.

Instead of a year or two for robbery, or even a parole sentence and hefty fine for being young and damn and trying doors they end up with fifty year or life sentences due to other people killing one of their friends.

There's one (of many) area that could be cleaned out to make room for the actually intentionally violent.

[nasmorn]

So if my importing a restricted exotic animal (felony under the Lacey act) leads to someone’s death (TSA agent shooting my mom who becomes hysterical as she sees the snake in my suitcase) I could go to prison for life?

[defrost]

Conceivably.

From what I read of the uneven application of that which is termed "justice" in the US I imagine it to be possible that a career hungry prosecutor roped in to cover up a potential scandal might see an opportunity to threaten you with a Felony Murder charge and force you into a plea deal should you happened to be, let's say, somewhat less than of pearly unshaded WASP white heritage and lack connections.

[JumpCrisscross]

Source?

[aerostable_slug]

California's rather controversial Prop 57 (early release from prison) uses the list of violent felonies outlined in § 667.5(c) of the California penal code, which excludes a number of felonies many feel are in fact violent. This is because it that list was never intended to be used as an exhaustive list or used for determining early release from prison, it was supposed to be a list of the most dire felonies used for calculating mandatory life imprisonment. Jerry Brown and his supporters changed that, and thus rape of an unconscious person and many other violent crimes still allowed perpetrators to serve only half of their sentences.

California Senate Bill 268 closed the classification gap by adding certain rapes of intoxicated or unconscious victims (especially when the defendant administered the intoxicating substance) to the list of “violent felonies” under § 667.5. It went into effect at the beginning of 2025.