California v. Vukodinovich
Annotate this CaseDefendant Thomas Vukodinovich was the 73-year-old bus driver for Yolo Employment Services, a nonprofit agency providing work activity programs, job training, and job retention for individuals with disabilities, who was entrusted with taking clients to and from work. "L." was a 49-year-old female client of Yolo Employment Services with a mental age of three or four and an IQ of 37 who rode defendant’s bus. From 2009 through 2012, defendant and L. carried on a sexual relationship. Defendant was prosecuted for the sex acts on the sole theory that L. was incapable of giving legal consent. The jury found defendant guilty of one count of sexual intercourse, one count of attempted sexual intercourse, five counts of oral copulation, and four counts of digital penetration, all with a person who “is incapable, because of a mental disorder or developmental or physical disability, of giving legal consent.” The court sentenced defendant to 14 years in prison. In the published portion of this opinion, the Court of Appeal rejected defendant’s contentions that these penal laws impinged on his and L.’s rights to privacy, and that there was insufficient evidence of a lack of legal consent to support these convictions. In the unpublished portion of this opinion, the Court rejected defendant’s other contentions.
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