Felix Rojas, 44, arraigned after video showed him performing sexual acts on unresponsive passenger
Authorities in New York have charged a man with attempted rape after surveillance video taken showed him performing sexual acts on an unresponsive passenger who was later determined to have died.
Police have been looking for suspects in the case for weeks, after footage captured two different people robbing the corpse of a man on a train traveling from Brooklyn to Manhattan, one of whom allegedly sexually violated him.
Felix Rojas, 44, was arraigned on Tuesday, three weeks after authorities said he abused the male victim inside a subway car. Rojas, who was arrested on Sunday, has also been charged with attempted grand larceny.
I mean, the dead can’t consent.
Also the article says “unresponsive passenger.” We know now the person was dead, but that doesn’t mean the rapist was clear on that fact at the time.
The dead also can’t have their consent violated and feel that particular psychological trauma which I think is the real root of what makes rape such a particularly awful thing.
Fair enough, but when someone commits an arson not knowing someone’s in the building and that person dies it’s still murder, and it doesn’t seem right that defendant knowledge matters in one situation and not the other.
I’d say if the alleged conduct here is true it should be charged as attempted rape and punished the same as an actual rape, so this is kind of a semantic thing, but it’s something I feel pretty strongly about. I just think that it dilutes our understanding of what rape is and why it’s so horrible to call something rape when it doesn’t happen to a living creature.
From the details given, it’s not clear if the person was dead or only unconscious at the time of the assault and it’s not clear whether the attacker knew either.
I’m not clear on your second point; you say that it doesn’t seem right that defendant knowledge matters in one case and not the other. So if:
It seems like not calling it rape is what would apply a double standard here based on defendant knowledge.
Our society treats bodies as an extension of a person; for example, we do not harvest organs from a body if the person didn’t consent to be an organ donor while they were alive.
Your focus on the victim’s suffering as what determines the severity of the crime seems problematic to me. If a victim doesn’t let being raped destroy their life, do we not punish the rapist as severely? We distinguish between manslaughter and murder based on pre-meditation and intent, even though the victim is still dead in both cases, and similarly I think that focusing on the attacker’s actions and intent should be the key factor in calling their actions rape.
If the defendant were going to a morgue or funeral home and defiling bodies, I may feel differently but given the timing here it feels way too grey to not treat it as rape.
FWIW, I’m coming at this conversation as a rape survivor myself. I know the level of mental devastation it can cause. And personally, I don’t think that treating the sexual assault of someone who may or may not have been dead yet (and if they were dead, had been so for no more than 30 minutes) as rape takes anything away from the severity of the crime or my experience as a victim of it.
And anyway from a semantic perspective, according to the article it is being charged only as attempted rape.
By that logic, you can’t steal from the dead because they no longer own the property. Because the act of stealing is taking something that belongs to someone else.
This is incorrect as your property is transferred to someone else upon your death, so it’s still theft.
The dead can’t consent the same way other inanimate objects can’t consent.
The dead are just bags of meat. This is like claiming that tendorizing a steak should be considered “animal abuse.” I do think there’s traction in the argument that the perpetrator didn’t know the individual was dead therefore it could be considered rape, but in our discussion of hypotheticals here, I don’t think that’s relevant.