Social media is stirring about a letter by the father of ex-Oakwood and Stanford University swimmer Brock Turner prior to his son’s sentencing Friday in a sexual assault case.
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Over the weekend, Dauber was responsible for tweeting portions of the probation pre-sentence report containing a statement attributed to Brock’s father, Dan Turner, who pleaded for leniency, saying the verdict had “broken and shattered” his son.
But others, including the Santa Clara District Attorney Jeff Rosen, say Turner, who was a top swimmer at Stanford, got off easy when he was sentenced to six months in county jail and three years’ probation.
A booking photo provided by the Santa Clara County sheriff shows Brock Turner, whose sentence of six months in jail for sexually assaulting an unconscious woman has caused outrage.
Carl-Fredrik Arndt tells CBS News (http://cbsn.ws/25K6Ca9 ) that he and his friend stopped the January 2015 attack after they happened to ride by on bicycles. He said the woman was unconscious the entire time because he checked her and she “didn’t move at all”.
CNN anchor Ashleigh Banfield read the victim’s statement, almost all 7,244 words of it, live on the air Monday.
The university says it’s a national leader in prevention programs, student training on intervention and support for victims.
“There is still much work to be done, not just here, but everywhere, to create a culture that does not tolerate sexual violence in any form and a judicial system that deals appropriately with sexual assault cases”, its statement said.
Aaron Persky, the judge in question, is up for reelection today in the California Primary – kind of bad timing for him.
Golic continued to rant that the judge felt “a prison sentence would have a severe of impact on him, and I don’t think he’ll be a danger to others”.
As you might expect, critics have gone off on Persky ever since, especially in light of the moving statement also made in court by the victim.
“He is an absolutely solid and respected judge”, Santa Clara County deputy public defender Gary Goodman told the Associated Press. Stanford Law Professor Michelle Dauber believed that this influenced the judge’s decision who was “persuaded by the background of the young man as an elite athlete”.
“His life will never be the one that he dreamed about and worked so hard to achieve”, the father wrote. “That is a steep price to pay for 20 minutes of action out of his 20 plus years of life”. Turner still maintains that his victim consented to being digitally penetrated on the ground by a dumpster, though she was unconscious during the attack. Both were heavily intoxicated, and the woman testified in court that she has no memory of the assault.
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This sad case has also gone viral because Turner’s dad, Dan Turner, wrote a letter defending the college athlete surfaced. “I became closed off, angry, self-deprecating, tired, irritable, empty”, she said. As a criminal prosecutor in Santa Clara’s district attorney office, Persky concentrated “on the prosecution of sexually violent predators, working to keep the most risky sex offenders in custody in mental hospitals”, according to his campaign website. The sentence does not factor in the true seriousness of this sexual assault, or the victim’s ongoing trauma.
