How familiar were you and/or your friends with how Brock Turner behaved when he was extremely drunk? He probably wouldn’t take off an unconscious woman’s underwear and stick his finger in her when he was sober, after all.
@GnocchiB The police report was linked in a couple of news articles I read.
@ahsmuoh He’s a rapist. I agree that it is “unfortunate” that there are men who are rapists.
Same could have been said about Owen Labrie. He had everyone at his school fooled. Google him if you don’t know the story.
Isn’t this victim blaming? The state of California was the one who pressed charges.
Read the police reports @jonri linked if you haven’t already. It’s hard to come away with any conclusion other than the one the jury came to.
It is unfortunate that he chose to do something that most consider morally reprehensible as well as illegal. It is also unfortunate the he will now be imposing on California taxpayers a cost of $47,000 per year of imprisonment due to his actions.
It is relatively easy to have good character 99% of the time. What is hard is that 1%, especially if you think you won’t get caught, and possibly are impaired by alcohol yourself. So it doesn’t surprise me that most people who knew him didn’t expect this behavior.
It seems to be a general reaction not to want a formerly “nice” young man to suffer severe life-long consequences for committing drunken rape. “Missoula” which dstark recommended to us on a book thread, gave a very moving and powerful description of the severe long term consequences to the victims of these accidental drunken rapists. It pretty much decided me the consequences to the survivors were much worse, and they needed to be made as whole as much as is possible.
I wish I could like that statement 20 times @alh!
We could equally say, “she was such a nice girl before that thing happened that still gives her nightmares… She was such a good student, a functioning person without PTSD, a sexually uncomplicated and happy person, she loved her own body, her own dorm room, her friends on the swim team, etc.”
Huh? It seems like only one poster in this thread had anything that may be construed as resembling this reaction.
http://www.sfgate.com/crime/article/Ex-Stanford-swimmer-to-serve-6-months-in-7960806.php
Superior Court Judge Aaron Persky sentenced Brock Turner to 6 months in jail, much shorter than the maximum 10 years in prison for the crimes which has was found guilty of by a jury (assault with intent to commit rape of an intoxicated/unconscious person, penetration of an intoxicated person, and penetration of an unconscious person). District Attorney Jeff Rosen was not pleased.
Turner will still have to register as a sex offender.
Wow!
This is the definition of a rape culture.
So many people on CC ask why young women who say they were raped don’t report it to the police. Think of everything this young woman went through…and he got six months. Serioously? The young woman in this case was punished FAR more harshly than the perp.
@jonri, you are totally right.
I am a little tired of reading how victims should behave.
“You should report the attack to the police!”.
Lol!
Great. "Step right up. Report to the police. “Become a victim twice!”.
These victims, after attacks, look like they are behaving and thinking rationally when they don’t report.
The fact that the girl dropped charges doesn’t matter, they had witness to what the guy did, plus they also probably did a BAC on the girl and it was likely high enough where she couldn’t consent…
As far as alchohol “making” the boy do this, I agree with another poster, that is utter BS. Alcohol lowers inhibitions,and if someone is drunk and does something like this it means they had deep down no problem with having sex with someone who was passed out, alchohol only took away inhitions from doing so, based on knowing it was a crime, for example, or even that it would hurt the girl to do what he did. There are gray areas in all of this, if the boy and the girl are drunk there is an automatic assumption that the boy is guilty of sexual assault, but what if the girl in that case in effect took advantage of him? In something like this, though, the boy obviously was not a victim, he had the cognition to run away when the grad students showed up, and he was physically able to do what he did.
To be honest, this was not a young person making a mistake, this was a creep who when drunk let the inner creep out, leaving out the obvious, that there is so much information out there these days on non consensual sex, what kind of fun can it be for someone to have sex with someone who is basically totally out of it? And if they can enjoy this, how disturbed are they, how little does the accused think of women that doing what he did was ‘okay’? He basically used the girl in question, like she was an inflatable sex doll, no care for her whatever, and that is not a ‘youthful mistake’, that is someone lacking empathy or caring; the booze may have let it out, but that kid has serious problems IMO. I hope he does get help, because otherwise someday someone else will experience his lack of empathy and lack of understanding, and will get hurt in some way.
As far as everyone saying “oh, he isn’t like that”, how many times have we all heard that? I remember a case years ago where a young woman killed her father or stepfather and said he had been abusing her and was about to start abusing her younger sister. Even when evidence came out to show that the girl had been abused, that the father was a drunk and a lot of other things, all your heard was “He would never do tjhat, he was a darling man, he helped X, he coached little league”…problem is people often see what they want to see, blank out what they don’t, not to mention that some of the sickest serial killers were often described by others who knew them as charming, wonderful people…
According to https://www.sccgov.org/sites/rov/Info/Documents/Office-Holders-List.pdf , Aaron Persky is up for reelection in 2016. However, Superior Court Judges are only put on the ballot if there are challengers, and it appears from https://eservices.sccgov.org/rov/docs/voterguide/107/BG63NPENG-ebook.pdf that there are no challengers for any Superior Court Judges in the county this year (because there are none on the ballot). So it looks like he has until 2022 at least for people who do not like his decision here to forget.
With the overcrowding in the California correctional system I wonder how much time he will really serve?
He will have the 3 years probation and lifetime sex offender status.
This is beyond wrong. Poor girl.
Re @ucbalumnus’s post in #33: I think the sentence sounds way too light, but I am absolutely 100% against targeting judges in elections based on sentences that are perceived to be too light in individual cases. It establishes incentives that are entirely at odds with a healthy, independent judiciary. It is a terrible suggestion.
Luckily, it almost never happens in California; judges are occasionally challenged by individuals with personal vendettas or for other idiosyncratic reasons, but (thank God!) in recent history, judges are rarely challenged based on political reactions to their rulings.
Are judges in California elected? Retained? If the electorate votes only to retain, it is rare that a judge is voted out. In my state judges are retained, and the only ones I know voted out were after a campaign by the bar association. One was so rude to attorneys that public defenders and DA’s alike wanted him gone. It wasn’t for his rulings on sentences, but just generally being an ass. But it took an effort to get him out. Many voters don’t care about the races or issues at the bottom of the ballot.
Disgusting, but predictable.
People upthread are right. This is a huge reason why people don’t come forward. We’re revictimized by the reporting process and then our pain is laughed at when the men essentially walk free.
And posters go on and on about what a joke the college tribunal system is. Well guess what? This sentence is a joke. With all the police investigations, due process and checks in place, this is the best they can do? With multiple witnesses and 2 good samaritans that intervened???