Limited to Errors of Law: Rape Law and Adjudication in the Nineteenth-Century Kentucky Court of Appeals

44 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY “Limited to Errors of Law”: Rape Law and Adjudication in the NineteenthCentury Kentucky Court of Appeals Mary R. Block I n June 1858, a circuit court jury in Fayette County, Kentucky, convicted Robert H. Champ of the rape of twenty-eight-year-old Sally Champ, his brother’s widow, and sentenced him to fifteen years in prison. The statute in force when the Commonwealth indicted Robert Champ decreed that “Whoever shall unlawfully and carnally know any white woman, against her will or consent , or by force, or whilst she is insensible, shall be guilty of rape, and shall be confined in the penitentiary from ten to twenty years.” The jurors felt that Robert Champ’s assault against his widowed sister-in-law was serious enough to call for more prison time than the minimum, but not so serious as to warrant the full punishment. Believing the jury had wrongly convicted him, Robert Champ petitioned the Kentucky Court of Appeals, the Commonwealth’s highest court in the nineteenth century, to reverse the guilty verdict on grounds the trial judge should have allowed certain expert testimony that Champ felt was exculpatory. He lost. Throughout the nineteenth century the Kentucky Court of Appeals practiced what legal historians call “legal formalism,” tending to adhere to well-established common law precedents and doctrines in cases involving felony convictions for the rape of adult women. Whereas several state supreme courts Americanized some common law principles controlling rape adjudication, the Kentucky court continued to rely on the tenets that renowned legal authority Sir William Blackstone laid out in his highly influential work, Commentaries on the Laws of England. The Kentucky court showed an especially strong tendency to legal formalism in rape cases involving questions of character evidence, the want of evidence to warrant a verdict, and a defendants’ right to the compulsory process to get his witnesses to court.1 At trial, Sally Champ testified that Robert Champ came to her home early one morning when only her youngest daughter and two of her slaves were present. He said he wanted to see the new blinds that Sally had just put up because his wife wanted some like them. Sally testified that when she showed Robert the blinds he told her they were not as pretty as she and then he grabbed her and put a vial to her nose. She passed out briefly, but regained consciousness before he had completed “the act of violence” against her. Though unsteady, she managed to get to her feet and flee. Without delay, Sally sent her slave girl to get Sally’s parents and, MARY R. BLOCK FALL 2011 45 while the slave was running that errand, Sally’s nephew and the manager of her plantation, Thomas Brand, entered and she immediately told him what Robert had done. Robert Champ came into the room as Sally was relating the story and promptly accused the woman of being insane. Three reputable women from the community examined Sally a short time after the incident and two of them testified that her body showed marks of violence and that she was swollen and bruised in her private parts. She complained of being in great pain. The women concurred with the defendant that Sally seemed “crazy” immediately after the assault, but said that ordinarily she was not that way. During the trial, Robert did not employ the usual defense tactic in rape cases of attacking the complainant’s character because Sally Champ’s unimpeachable reputation made it untenable.2 The Champ case represents a textbook example of how contemporaries believed a woman should behave and what she had to do to achieve a conviction for felony rape. In Commentaries on the Laws of England, Blackstone set forth the vital ingredients essential to believe a woman’s claim of forcible rape. Relying on common law principles dating back to the mid-thirteenth century, Blackstone wrote that “in order to prevent malicious accusations, it was the law . . . that the woman should immediately after, go to the next town, and there make discovery to some credible persons of the injury she has suffered.” Sally Champ immediately dispatched her slave girl to get Sally...