The state's highest court ruled yesterday that a man can be charged with rape if he ignores a woman's calls to stop - even if she had previously consented to sex.
With this expansion of the legal definition of rape, Maryland joins seven other states whose courts have determined that a woman can revoke her consent after intercourse begins.
"This goes to the heart of women's autonomy," said Lisae C. Jordan, legal director of the Maryland Coalition Against Sexual Assault, which filed a brief in the matter. "It says that, yes, women do have the right to make decisions about something as intimate as sexual intercourse."
The Maryland Court of Appeals' opinion in a rape case from Montgomery County overturns what defense attorneys and a lower appeals court said was existing common law and the high court's own 1980 opinion.
All seven judges agreed that a woman has the right to revoke consent, but reached that conclusion in different ways. Yesterday's ruling returns the 2004 rape case of Maouloud Baby to Montgomery County for a new trial.
Baby's case drew the attention of the state's highest court - and of national and state women's groups - when the Maryland Court of Special Appeals overturned his convictions for first-degree rape and other sex offenses in October 2006.
The case stems from a December 2003 incident in which he and a friend, both high school students, had sex with a community college student in an isolated school parking lot.
Baby, then 16, and Michael Wilson, 15, groped the woman and made sexual advances to her, according to police. First, Wilson had sex with the woman while Baby was outside the car. Then, police said, Baby told her it was his turn.
"[So] are you going to let me hit it?" he said, according to police. "I don't want to rape you."
The victim testified in Montgomery County court that she agreed to sex "as long as he stops when I tell him to." As he began, she told him to stop because he was hurting her, but he kept going for five or 10 seconds, she said.
Wilson pleaded guilty to second-degree rape and was sentenced to 18 months in prison. Baby denied any wrongdoing but was convicted of first-degree rape and other crimes and sentenced to 15 years in prison, with all but five suspended.
Mel Feit, director of the National Center for Men, based in Long Island, N.Y., said the facts of Baby's case have been lost in the larger argument about a woman's right to say no.
