Workshop for Beginning Legal Writing Teachers - AALS

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Workshop for Beginning Legal Writing Teachers
sitting in a public place and one that happened to be close to his own home. These facts
can contribute to the argument that Mr. Pemberque was not actually trying to deliberately
maintain visual or physical proximity with the victim in specific.
However, the state probably has the strongest argument. The police department saw
Mr. Pemberque repeatedly parking in front of the Lani residence on two occasions easily
establishes that he “repeatedly” parked there. Additionally, the fact that Mr. Pemberque
was seen repeatedly parking at the residence only when the victim was known to be home
helps to show that Mr. Pemberque followed a specific person.
Reasonable Fear
The Washington State stalking statute, RCW 9A.46.110 defines a “reasonable fear”
as:
(b) The person being harassed or followed is places in fear that the stalker intends to
injure the person, another person, or property of the person or of another person.
The feeling of fear must be one that a reasonable person in the same situation would
experience under all the circumstances.
State v. Ainslie provides some clarification as to what types of circumstances about the
victim that provide a ‘reasonable fear’ of being personally injured, another being injured or
one’s property being injured by the stalker. In Ainslie, the Court stated that the fact that the
victim was a 14-year-old girl, that she was “walking alone” and that her father warned the
defendant by chasing him away all provided indication of the victim’s fear. According to The
Court in Ainslie, “these facts are sufficient to elicit fear that is objectively reasonable.”
Although what determines whether something is “reasonable” or not is not specifically
defined in the statute, State v. Ainslie also attempts to clarify the definition by referring to
the fear as “objectively reasonable”.
In our case, the State will argue that the defendant had just been released from prison,
and because of his status as a sex offender, he knew that he was more at-risk to be
attacked, or more carefully watched by individuals in the general public in effect making
him a targeted community member. Therefore, because Mr. Lani knew of his status of a
sex offender, he had a heightened sense of fear of his surroundings. Furthermore, the
State will argue that the victim had been known (Mr. Pemberque admitted to knowing) to
have a developmental disability. Thus, the victim’s perception of a fear may have been
slightly different than that of an individual without such a disability. In plain terms, Mr. Lani
may have been more likely to conceive feelings of fear given his mental capacity, and as
such his fear given his mental state was entirely reasonable.
We can argue that the very fact that the victim was a sex offender makes his fear less
reasonable in that, he would’ve known that by nature of being a sex offender, people
might be more afraid of him, than he is of other people. Additionally, with the registration
requirement that comes with being a sex offender, we can cargue that Mr. Lani is right
to assume that people won’t target him because of the highly restrictive and watchful