Changing your mind
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We all change our minds once in a while. We think something is a good idea at first and then we decide that it wasn't so good after all. A recent Post article tells how the Maryland Court of Appeals recently overturned a ruling by an lower court. The former ruling held that when a woman first consents to have sexual intercourse and then changes her mind during the act, this change of mind doesn't override her initial consent. Her "yes" remained "yes." The Appeals Court, in contrast, held that when a woman first consents and then changes her mind in the midst of having sex with a man, that man can be charged with rape. Her "yes" changed to "no." By no means am I defending rapists here but this decision opens the door to a number of issues, some legal, some possibly linguistic. In this case, the woman gave her consent and told her partner to stop. She testified that he continued for "five or so" seconds after she reported her change of mind. I'm also not going to get into how long it takes an excited male to stop doing something so motivating and pleasurable or exactly how "stop" can be defined here. I leave that for those who have other kinds of expertise.
Instead, I'm interested in the effect that changing one's mind has for criminal cases in which defendants first decided on one bad path of action, then came to their senses and changed their minds before anything bad or illegal ever happened.
Take solicitation to murder cases, for example. I've consulted on several cases in which the defendants were so angry that they asked an undercover agent posing as a hit man to kill someone. The discussions about this continued for a while and at some point the defendants had changes of heart and called the whole thing off. True, they had indeed made the solicitation but, with their change of mind, no physical harm was done. But that didn't seem to matter to the court. Listeners somehow know the rules about how to perform the illocutionary act of soliciting and they assume that the conditions regulating it– the propositional content, the preparatory condition (the speaker has the authority to make it), and the sincerity condition (intentionality)– had been met.
It would seem that in criminal cases changing one's mind should make a difference. In the Maryland case, the court thought it did. In the cases I've worked on, the answer was no. Interestingly, in both the rape case and the solicitation to murder cases, the ultimate answers favored the prosecution. Once the men committed the solicitation speech act crime, they couldn't take it back. In contrast, the woman who charged the man with raping her could. But before I take this too far, consider the case of Kelsey Karp almost a year ago. He clearly demonstrated his intention to hire an undercover agent posing as a hit man by giving him $500 as a down payment. Shortly after doing this, Karp dialed what he thought was the hit man's telephone number to call it all off. This turned out to be a wrong number but, through a strange coincidence, the person who received the accidental call notified a relative who worked at the police station, who later verified Karp's intention to cancel the hit. The prosecutor in this case considered Karp's change of mind significant enough to reduce the charges from a second-degree conspiracy felony to a lesser felony charge of 6 months in prison and 5 years of probation. So apparently the speech act of soliciting murder doesn't have to remain permanent.
All of the examples given so far involve changes of mind from "yes" to "no". Mind changing can go the other way too. Take the case of former Congressman Richard Kelly. He was a representative from Florida who, when caught in the FBI's Abscam investigation in the 1980s, changed his mind from "no" to "yes". An undercover agent videotaped a conversation in which he offered Kelly a bribe. Kelly directly or indirectly turned it down eight times before he silently stuffed the cash into his pockets. Yes, he certainly took the money but we are left to wonder about a different problem. How many times does a law officer have to hear a target say "no" before he changes his mind to "yes"? Could it be, for example, that by making the same offer over and over again the agent actually encouraged the target to change his mind and commit the crime? If so, should that have some bearing on the outcome of the case? I'm not saying it should, but maybe the issue ought to be considered a bit.
I'm not saying that rape or bribery are anything like each other, but I wonder how the legal system systematically decides how fast, permanent, or decisive a change of mind has to be accomplished, how clear the "no" or "stop" has to be, and how many times a person needs to say either "yes" or "no" before we know what is meant. The people who solicited murder and the Congressman who took the bribe certainly committed the speech acts for which they were charged. The Maryland woman who accused the man of rape reports that she told him to "stop". All involved changes of mind during these ongoing events. But I'm left with some uneasy feelings about the ultimate significance and finality about when and how we say what we say in relation to what we have finally decided or intended to do.
It seems to me that the language of starting in one direction and then intentionally reversing course hasn't received enough attention and thought. My admittedly superficial check on this topic tells me that most of what has been written about changing one's mind deals with changing the minds of others (persuasion), with self-help materials, with religion, and with changing wills and trusts. It would seem that changing one's mind might be a topic for some linguistic research, maybe in the area of discourse analysis.