Can You Sleepwalk Into a Crime?

Alex

Can you sleepwalk your way into crime? That's what happened to Adam Ball, who sleepwalked into an underaged girl's bed:

Just over a year ago, Alan Ball went to a New Year's Eve house party, drank heavily and fell asleep on a sofa.

At some point during the night, he got up, went upstairs and climbed into bed with an under-age girl, whom he kissed on the lips.

After a year in which this lorry-driving father lost his job and was able to see his five-year-old daughter only during supervised visits, a judge at Preston Crown Court this week cleared him of sexual assault after the 35-year-old claimed he was sleepwalking at the time of the incident and had no memory of the events.

Marcus Dunk of The Daily Mail has the story: Link

(Photo: Bruce Adams)


Comments (26)

As much as this story begs for skepticism, I have known some serious sleepwalkers, especially the black-out drunk variety.

I was once lying in bed when a friend of mine walked into the room, did several super dramatic Segal-style karate moves, pissed on a wall socket, then basically did a somersault onto the bed, where I barely missed being crushed as I rolled, stunt man-like, out of the way. He had absolutely no recollection of this.
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"honestly!!! i was sleepwalking naked through your bedroom while you were out of town and i must've tripped on something and my d*ck fell into your wife!!! NO REALLY!!!! honest mistake"
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Oh gosh. Kissing a minor on the lips is sexual assault, these days? Guess that would make my parents repeat sex offenders.

Seriously though, regardless of whether this man is a liar or not, I personally know people who sleepwalk like this. One of my roommates has done many things while asleep, acting exactly as if she were awake. Once she came into our room, borrowed our milk, tried to give us a $20 for it, and ran back into our room an hour later completely baffled as to how our milk ended up in her room.
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I'm not so sure 'sleepwalking' is the same thing as 'stumbling around in a drunken blackout'.

Granted, the concious mind doesn't retain memories of either activity.
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No matter what happened this time, if he is a predator, it will happen again and he will be caught. If not, then it will not happen and will become the stuff of bad pub jokes.
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Well, it does sound suspicious, but I've had a few of my own experiences when I was younger sleepwalking.
I'd go to bed and wake up in a completely different part of the house.
The last time it happened, I was over at my cousin's house spending the night. Went to bed on her bed next to her, woke up in the middle of the night sitting crosslegged on the floor wedged in between her dresser and something else.
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the name will come to me later... but there is a popular stand up that has that kinda problem. just with his regular sleeping... no drinking involved. apparently, he tried to jump out of a hotel window and lots of other stuff.. theres a name for it too.. thats escaping me as well..
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If, instead of kissing a girl, he had gotten in a car and run over some pedestrians, would the blackout excuse still work?

All I really see here is someone voluntarily taking a mind altering substance and then committed a crime.
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seekshelter - i know who you're talking about, but i don't remember his name either. he did a hillarious and sad bit on this american life earlier this year.
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I forwarded a news link to neatorama editors a while ago (don't think it ever got posted), but there was a story about a woman that actually got up and emailed someone while she was asleep, the first recorded case of a human emailing and using the computer while sleepwalking. I'm sure many things are possible sleep walking. But it does make you wonder if someone that would do this didn't have such tendencies in the first place.
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@ seek & sw - Mike Birbiglia, he has rapid eye movement behavior disorder (RBD)

You've got to be suspicious about peoples stories, but people get drunk and blackout all the time. I partake on occasion. Every once in a while I'll have too much, get in bed next to my girlfriend, and the next thing I know she's waking me up in some strange corner of the house. I've been waken up sitting tables, on the floor right next to the bed, on the cold kitchen tile with no pillow or blanket, or even in the closet. It wouldn't be hard for me to imagine having some friends over, letting them crash in the guest room and me waking up next to them instead of where I originally went to bed.
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Gotta go with "Just a guy's" reasoning - drunken & s#$@-faced doesn't equal sleepwalking - he shouldn't be excused. I used to sleepwalk as a kid and it's God's truth that no memory exists for it, bizarre as it sounds. Used to scare the hell out of my mother when she discovered me wandering about the house and spied me wanting to pee on the lawn etc. But sleepwalking in kids isn't abnormal. They outgrow it. In Adults it is definitely pathologic or induced by sleep aids. Drunkeness is not an excuse.
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I agree with drunkenness being no excuse. And as for sleep walking, there are people that have actually tried to use that as an excuse for raping a girl. Which I think it total BS. You can do some crazy stuff while sleep walking but raping people? Cmon.
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Certain medications absolutely can cause sleepwalking , especially some of the newer atypical antipsychotics (and yes, those are prescribed for lots of things besides being nuts. Since I take one, I do get to use the term "nuts"if I so choose.;) Remeron is particularly bad in this respect. Basically, these meds "unlock" movement centers in the brain that are normally locked during REM sleep. I had a lot of sleepwalking when I first started Seroquel and some of it was actually pretty dangerous (walking into walls and falling against tables), although it did NOT cause me to do anything like what this guy did, which does make me a tad bit suspicious of the story. Also, it's not going to hold water unless he can prove he was actually taking one of these meds at the time.
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@Manik -
"It wouldn’t be hard for me to imagine having some friends over, letting them crash in the guest room and me waking up next to them".

sounds like another case of waking up 'in the closet'. lol .

j/k ;)
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without even drinking one night, i slept at a friends, and woke up in her brothers bed
luckily, he wasnt home...

occasionally, i apparently get out of bed and yell at my sister, pass out on her bed for a while then go back to my room
on several occasions...
i could believe him just cause i know something like that could happen to me, but idk
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not neat.
do you find it neat that he did it and got away with it?

it would make an important distinction how she was, as it only says she was under-age and also if she wanted him to at the time and then later regretted it. should be taken into consideration also.

there's under the legal limit and then there's paedophilia, important distinction also.
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Does anyone else find it strange that a guy who crawled into bed with an underage girl has the same name as the guy who wrote "American Beauty"?
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My sister sleepwalks. When I lived in a townhouse with her and my mom, she would sleepwalk up and down two flights of stairs just fine. One example is when she wandered down into my room. I awoke to her fussing with a beanbag chair. I asked what she was doing, and she just looked right through me, and said she was looking to get ready for school. Asked where her books were. She thought it was her bookbag.

Typically I couldn't wake her, and would just lead her back to her room. Stress does funny things to people.
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