Stanford students, law professors and campus sexual assault activists are decrying what they call an injustice and risky precedent of a judge’s decision to give a six-month jail sentence to a former Stanford swimmer convicted of sexually assaulting an unconscious woman outside a fraternity party.
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The Mercury News of San Jose reported that the California Commission on Judicial Performance and Santa Clara County District Attorney Jeff Rose have been asked to take action against Persky and to request a legal measure known as a writ review that would allow another judge to issue a harsher sentence against the Stanford swimmer. “A judge who attended Stanford and played lacrosse there as an undergraduate sentenced the 20-year-old Turner of Dayton, Ohio, to the jail stint, three years” probation and ordered him to register as a sex offender. Four months later, Stanford police arrested Turner for assaulting the woman he had met while they both were drunk at a fraternity party. A statement by Turner’s father, dismissively describing the assault as “20 minutes of action”, exacerbated the outrage, and there has been pressure on the judge over the leniency of sentence. “We don’t believe that we have a basis to appeal or seek a writ in this case, though, because his decision was authorized by law and was made by applying the correct standards”.
The group has also filed a formal complaint with the commission.
Challengers can run for the six-year term as a write-in candidate by expressing such interest to the Santa Clara County Registrar of Voters by August 17 by submitting a statement of candidacy and 600 valid signatures.
“I have daughters in college myself, and I find it deeply disturbing that a judge like Persky could let a campus predator like Turner off with barely a slap on the wrist”, Shallman said. A call to commission attorney Victoria Henley about what penalties the agency could impose was not immediately returned.
Organizers would need to collect 58,634 signatures from registered county voters, and a recall election would follow.
Several efforts are taking place to remove Judge Aaron Persky from the bench, including a petition, official recall and a letter from a state senator asking the judge to resign. “He does not understand violence against women”, said Stanford law professor Michele Dauber, who launched the recall campaign.
Lawyers who have appeared in Persky’s court have called him a fair and respected judge.
“Brock Turner’s membership with USA Swimming expired at the end of the calendar year 2014 and he was not a member at the time of his crime or since then”, USA Swimming spokesman Scott Leightman said. “We would be safer as a community if we knew who those people were”.
Sure, the backlash against the paltry six-month sentence handed to the lauded athlete proves the broader community is sick to death of a risky and pervasive culture of sexual entitlement, but petitions and rallying cries still won’t change the fact he sexually assaulted another student. He has no record of judicial discipline and previously worked as a prosecutor responsible for keeping sexual predators locked up.
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In all, Turner was given six months in jail for the incident, a sentencing that has lead to massive upset in the high-profile case. County jail inmates serve 50 percent of their sentences if they keep a clean disciplinary record. Brock Turner’s crime was the result of Brock Turner. He faced 14 years in prison.
