In New York, a victim needs to convince a jury that a man put his penis in her vagina without her consent in order to prove rape. This is the layman’s translation of Rape 1, currently defined in criminal statute as forcible compulsion through “penetration, however slight, of the penis into the vaginal opening.”

It’s harder to prove than it sounds, because juries tend to get really hung up on the physics of a rape. Did the penis penetrate or merely have “contact” with the victim’s vagina? What if it wasn’t his penis, but just a finger—perhaps the view taken by some of the jurors in Carroll’s case (though she says both)? If she was also anally penetrated—which is not technically rape—can she be sure that she was also vaginally penetrated? None of this amounts to a hell of a lot of difference to the victim—who has to sit through the humiliation of a trial splitting hairs over which human organ touched which of her body parts and to what degree to the satisfaction of 12 random strangers.