ABSTRACT
A grand jury in Travis County, Texas, sitting in a seemingly ordinary case, returned a judgment in September 1992 that shocked the nation.1 The county district attorney had sought to persuade the grand jury that a stranger, Joel Valdez, 27, had broken into Elizabeth Wilson’s apartment and raped her at knife point. The prosecution’s uncontested evidence showed that in the early hours of the morning of September 17, 1992, Ms. Wilson, a 25-year-old artist, returned home after a party and went to bed. Ms. Wilson was awakened at 3:00 a.m. by a noise. When she turned on the light, she was confronted by Valdez, who was approaching her with a knife. She fled to the bathroom, where she locked the door and was dialing 911 when Valdez broke down the door, knocked the phone from her hand, and, knife in hand, ordered her to take off his pants. Ms. Wilson, fearing that Valdez would stab her if she resisted and that he would infect her with HIV if she submitted, agreed to submit to sexual intercourse with Valdez if he put on a condom. Valdez put the condom on and had sexual intercourse with Wilson over the course of an hour until she fled naked from the apartment and sought help from a neighbor. At the close of the prosecution’s case, the grand jury was instructed
that under Texas law rape is a crime of sexual intercourse for which consent is a defense. As is customary everywhere, the grand jury deliberated in secret and returned a ruling without explanation. The grand jury’s ruling was not to indict Valdez for rape. An unnamed ‘participant’ said later that several grand jurors believed that Ms. Wilson’s willingness to submit to sexual intercourse in return for Valdez’s wearing a condom constituted ‘consent’ on her part.2
