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Client found not guilty of sexual assault after five day trial. T.H. was a student in a University. T.H. and the complainant attended a friend’s house for a pre-drink prior to going to the bars. The house party went on for some hours and everyone played drinking games. Eventually T.H. and the complainant left the house and went back to his house. The two had intimate relations. The complainant woke up in T.H.’s house and did not remember the night. She spoke with T.H. who advised her that they had sex and about speaking about sex before being intimate. There were details about birth control and the complainant menstrating. The complainant left and over the course of a week spoke with friends and another female student who was at the house party. The conclusion was that she could not have consented and having been intoxicated she lacked the capacity to consent. The complainant sent a text to T.H. accusing him of sexual assault. T.H. replied and apologized and gave his version of the evening and sex. The complainant filed a complaint with the University and then the police. Joseph Neuberger was retained as his crininal defence lawyer. Joseph Neuberger put together a team from his office of John Navarrete and Diana Davison to work on the defence. At trial Joseph Neuberger surgically cross-examined all Crown witnesses to demonstrate their biased and wrongly held views on consent and capacity to consent and within that context their evidence was not reliable. There were many other areas of cross-examination after a successful 276 application about prior behavior of the complainant that undermined her evidence. For example the complainant alleged previous held attitudes about sex while menstruating; about sex for the first time with a man and her attitude of not being interested in T.H. that the Crown relied upon to demonstrate lack of consent. Cross-examination elicited evidence that directly contradicted these “attitudes” undermining the assertions of lack of consent. In relation to lack of capacity, Joseph Neuberger assailed the notion that an intoxicated party cannot consent. In fact an intoxicated consent is still consent. It may be that while intoxicated the complainant made choices that were not in her best interest and contrary to what she would normally do when sober but that in and of itself did not establish incapacity. Further, it became dangerously obvious that the “consent” education at the University was dramatically out of line with the law and infected the evidence with a skewed view of what actually took place the evening of the house party. Finally, underlying the evidence was an inherent bias about male sexual stereotypes that were improperly applied to the evidence including how it was used to frame T.H.’s text apology as a confession. After extensive written and oral submissions T.H. was found not guilty of sexual assault. To read the full text of the judgement