On Wednesday, a jury found former Stanford swimmer Brock Turner guilty of sexually assaulting an unconscious and intoxicated young woman outside a fraternity house.
20-year-old Turner was arrested Jan. 18, 2015, after two graduate students found him on top of an unmoving woman outside Kappa Alpha fraternity at approximately 1 a.m. Turner subsequently withdrew from Stanford and was charged with five felony counts, later reduced to three: assault with intent to commit rape of an intoxicated or unconscious person, sexual penetration of an intoxicated person and sexual penetration of an unconscious person.
Turner has been convicted on all counts. He faces a maximum prison sentence of 10 years and will now have to register as a sex offender.
Curious - good kid who made a horrible mistake because he was intoxicated or predator who had done something similar before and just happened to have gotten caught?
I don’t think he was convicted of rape… but intent to commit rape. The only reason I’m bringing it up is that I think there would be more jail time if he had been convicted of rape. It will be interesting to see what his sentence is.
I hate to argue about it but he first was charged with 5 counts and the 2 counts dropped were “rape of an intoxicated person, rape of an unconscious person” . So while I am not saying that he didn’t rape her what I am saying is that the conviction doesn’t say rape in it which I think would have added additional time on to his sentence.
When people wonder if these incidents may just be “drunken mistakes” I think about all the many many drunken fraternity brothers that I spent time with in college that never did anything remotely similar to what this guy was convicted of. Sure alcohol removes inhibitions, but I don’t believe it creates this kind of behavior. The “drunken mistakes” that my friends made were more like…falling down the stairs because they missed the railing. or peeing in the garbage can instead of in a toilet. You must be a completely different person inside to reach the level of Mr. Stanford I think.
He is only a 'former" swimmer because of this incident (just saying he was a freshman on campus and on the team when this happened. Kudos to the guys riding past who figured out something was wrong.
Well, after this guy serves his sentence, I hope he also gets intensive counseling, because there is something seriously sick about assaulting an unconscious person. I mean, no normal person would think having sex with an unresponsive person is fun, right?
However, this may have been an “easier” conviction to get than a typical sexual assault case, since he was doing it outside on a trail, when two passerby caught him in the act, noticed that the woman was non-responsive (she was very drunk and passed out), and caught and held him until police arrived.
Did he stumble over a passed out body and decide to have sex with it? Or did 2 drunk people start having sex and she passed out in the middle of it? Yes, the mere mention of “foreign objects” makes me queazy, but I don’t know what they are referring to. I don’t know what actually happened, but there are versions of the story that would make me think he is getting off easy, and other versions that would make me think he is unfairly convicted.
Well, he ran away and was apprehended when the graduate students came across him and the unconscious woman. That’s pretty strong evidence of consciousness of guilt.
Brock Turner should become pen pals with Owen Labrie. I’d guess that both young men wanted to have a big impact on society, and both did (but not in the way they ever expected).
After reading it, I’m convinced he is guilty. BTW, he did not know her name, anything about her and told the cops he did not think he could identify her if he saw her again.
NJres, everyone agrees that he and the young woman were at the party drinking. They went outside behind the frat house. Now accounts diverge.
This is what the grad students, who had nothing to do with Turner, testified: They were cycling home along the bike path that goes right behind the frat house. They saw Turner lying over the woman making thrusting movements. At first they thought this was a consensual sexual encounter, but then they notice she didn’t seem to be moving. They stopped to invesigate. He ran away. They chased him, or maybe one chased him and one saw to her.
It is unrebutted that by the time someone other than Turner checked on the woman, she was unconscious, lying on the ground with her underwear off and her skirt pulled up. She was taken to the hospital, where she remained unconscious for three hours.
He said she was conscious all the time he was doing anything sexual with her. To believe him, we have to believe that the cyclists happened along, they came to investigate, and just at that very moment by happenstance she fell unconscious and he ran away. The jury, obviously, didn’t believe that story.
This is a very unfortunate situation. Without giving too much information we know many many people that know Brock and there is not a person who knows him that says this is his character. We had heard that she had dropped the charges so this is very shocking.