Yeah that's pretty good. It's going around my Twitter and Facebook pretty fast right now.
Yeah that's pretty good. It's going around my Twitter and Facebook pretty fast right now.
What I get for posting from my phone.
That statement is incredibly well-said.
Also circulating today is the rapist's dad's statement asking for leniency, which is disgusting.
That is a powerful victim impact statement, and I can only admire her courage and her eloquence.
The statement by the rapey dad of the rapist is truly despicable. I honestly wish I had not read it. Makes me want to withdraw membership from the human race for at least a couple of months, if not longer.
Cases like these make me wonder about the rule of law. I don't know of a good alternative to the state having a monopoly on violence. So I still support it.
But is it idealistic? Something that only appears to exist inside the bubble inhabited by white, middle-class, men? Perhaps I'm blinkered if I condemn, for example, an underprivileged Latino for mixing it up with more than words at the San Jose rally.
What would make you go outside the system?
Eszter Hargattai made me read the whole thing very slowly. Yes it was excellent.
6: I don't wonder. The law is made outside the law, by the legitimate exceptions. Maybe I'll have more to say later, here or at CT.
What would make you go outside the system?
Love.
But it's not my right, it's hers.
You are right about the white male bubble. But from within that bubble we can't really protect and we can't give permission and we can't bear the sins of other men.
We can bear her sins with her, should she choose.
Cases like these make me wonder about the rule of law.
The rule of law is fine, but it could be improved in the execution. People like to rail against mandatory minimums but there's a second edge to that sword and this is it. The judge shouldn't have the latitude to impose a six month jail sentence on a rape conviction.
What I find striking about this case is that compared to a lot of rape cases, especially in the college context, it's essentially a successful prosecution with the system working as intended, except for the parts where individual parties are given a lot of discretion. The judge deciding on the sentence is the most egregious example, but it's also clear that Turner's decision to go to trial rather than taking a plea bargain, and his legal team's tactics throughout that process, were major factors in making this such an obviously painful process for the victim. I'm not sure changing the formal procedures is the answer, though, since the changes that would likely help the most are in cultural attitudes toward rape and how the legal system should address it. Hopefully the publicity around this and similar cases will at least contribute to an increasing deterrent effect on potential rapists.
Hopefully the publicity around this and similar cases will at least contribute to an increasing deterrent effect on potential rapists.
"Holy shit, he got caught in the act and convicted at trial and is going to jail for like 90 days."
10: And will be toxic to anybody who ever Googles his name. That doesn't justify the ludicrously light sentence, but it should have some deterrent effect on other privileged assholes.
Plus he does have to register as a sex offender for the rest of his life, so there's that.
And will be toxic to anybody who ever Googles his name.
Toxic to people with morals. He's a rich frat kid at Stanford, people with morals aren't in his social circle.
90 days in county jail with good behavior. It's the affluenza kid all over again.
I mean, obviously this is not an optimal outcome for the cause of justice. But given that the modal outcome of raping a random girl for a privileged asshole type like this is zero consequences whatsoever, I do think it's a small step in the right direction.
14: Going to be hard for him to hang onto that social circle. He's too young to have established relationships in the adult world, and he's going to be a tough sell to admissions and HR offices. They don't have to be moral, just invested enough in their own reputations not to want to be associated with him.
18: I really want to agree with you but odds are his life is "ruined" in the same manner as Polanksi and Woody Allen.
He's too young to have established relationships in the adult world, and he's going to be a tough sell to admissions and HR offices. They don't have to be moral, just invested enough in their own reputations not to want to be associated with him.
This depends on keeping up the pressure on those institutions to not acquiesce to whatever inducements his family and other supporters can provide. The institutional incentives do seem to be changing, though, with the ouster of Ken Starr and (more importantly) the football coach at Baylor being a promising sign.
19: I think (or at least hope) that it will be a lot harder for him to start a successful career than it was for them to keep theirs.
20: Yup. Also worthwhile for peers and prospective peers -- other young elite university types -- to be vocal about shaming anyone trying to excuse him.
This made all the local news tonight, which probably wouldn't have happened without the letter + online media to publish and circulate it.
8: I was thinking the same thing about mandatory minimums.
Also, if it were possible to vote any write-in against the judge I would, but apparently if no one opposes you you don't appear on the (primary) ballot.
23: Just the primary, or the general too? In a lot of places (including here) the judicial elections are just a yes or no on each judge.
(But it sounds like that may not be the case in California which is why I'm asking.)
That is a powerful letter. I hope she succeeds in clawing her life back.
That is a powerful letter. I hope she succeeds in clawing her life back.
24: I'm wondering that too. I seem to remember seeing judges as yes/no in the general before. I confess I haven't been great about voting in primaries.
Here's where I get confused. This is totally anecdotal. I've been part of a church group that supports prisoners who are getting a college education.
In meeting with the other teams (there are about 3 or 4 volunteers per team) I've heard a little bit about sentences for various offenses. Most of the people we support are there for drug offenses or drug-related offenses, but there are definitely murderers and rapists. The rapists get 18-24 years. Murderers get longer sentences, but the people with murder convictions are much more likely to get let out on parole than the people with rape convictions. In practice, murder seems to be punished less harshly than rape. I'm not sure where the breakdown occurs, because I know that the system doesn't work well for victims of sexual assault. At the same time, sexual offenses seem to be taken quite seriously by the corrections system once someone is convicted.
And prisoners certainly don't let the sex offenders off easily. They are treated as outcasts and scum within the prison, often separated out from the rest of the population for their own safety.
The differences in people let out on parole and how sex offenders are treated in prison compared to murderers makes at least some sense to me: a lot of crimes are committed out of if not desperation at least very little in the way of good choices. That's (almost?) never going to be the case with rapes or other sex offenders. And I suspect that given how shitty our system is about sexual assaults in general that the people who end up in jail for it are way more likely to be unambiguously nasty than people who end up there for murder.
28: That appears to be Supreme Court and Court of Appeals judges. This is a Superior Court judge, and they don't appear on the ballot if unopposed. According to Ballotpedia, in 2014, 450 of 470 judgeships were unopposed.
It's super depressing and her statement is very well-written.
More than anything, the father's statement convinces me the sentence is way too light.
29: no question that "the system doesn't work well for victims of sexual assault" - but the bits you're looking at aren't the bits where it is breaking. If you think of the flow from offence to reported crime to charge to conviction to sentencing, most of those bits are functioning. Once someone is charged with rape or sexual assault, the conviction rate is about 70% - similar to other violent crimes apart from murder, and way above the rates for non-violent crimes. Once they're convicted, the sentence is generally severe - average of eight years (in England anyway). But only 50% of reported crimes lead to a charge, and only about 10% of offences actually lead to a crime being reported.
34: I think "the system doesn't work well for victims of sexual assault" is larger than what you're looking at too, though. The ways she describes the legal system as being revictimizing are common. I have several friends who have to come up with new victim impact statements every time there's a parole hearing, and I was going to start to go on with this but everyone knows I've been personally and professionally involved in this sort of stuff and there's probably no point drawing it all out redundantly in a comment when no one's going to disagree.
In practice, murder seems to be punished less harshly than rape.
Not uncommon here either. Reality is that there's a hell of a lot of unsympathetic murder victims.
This is I think an opportunity for the father to experience negative professional and social consequences from the father's statement, by which i mean become a thoroughgoing pariah. Would at least create an incentive for counsel to future defendants to have interesting conversations with their clients and those clients' parents, etc. in advance of submitting anything similar.
thoroughgoing pariah
I didn't know anybody was keeping a registry for that.
38: I think it's called Trump's donor list.
37 makes sense. The six month sentence was completely shocking. I haven't followed the case in detail, and I suppose I could look this up, but does the State have a chance of knocking that sentence out on appeal? I think (not a criminal lawyer, at all!) the rule in CA is that the state can't appeal a sentence appropriately within CA guidelines, but can a six month sentence possibly be within a guideline for a rape offense where the guy is caught in the act? 10 years seems very low.
That was a powerful, effective, heartbreaking letter.
I almost missed it; I was trying to figure out why people were enthusiastic about the header image and short blurb by the reporter--I hit the wall of trending and shares and thought that was it. I assumed I'd missed a link. I'm glad I continued to scroll--I was afraid I'd be wandering into comments at that point!
It's super depressing and her statement is very well-written.
This is absolutely correct, and I'm very glad that I read it.
34: 18 years here, which I actually think is a bit high.
32/41/42/etc.: Agreed. I had to take a few breaks since it' shard to read, but it was worth it. God, what she went through. I hope it continues getting passed around--or, hell, being assigned reading--as it's a very powerful critique of rape culture.
If you'd told me prior to sentencing that the judge was a former lacrosse player, I would have told you Turner would get probation, so the judge really exceeded expectations.
Not even a real lacrosse player, but a lacrosse player in the 80s at Stanford, when it wasn't even conceivably an actual sport here but more an affiliation society for jock-y preppy wannabes.
My view is, you wanna play lacrosse in Maryland, fine, but keep that shit out of my state. If you want to be a white guy in a violent rich kids team sport, play water polo.
Douchebaggery aside, lacrosse is a completely awesome spectator sport.
Lacrosse is pretty fun to watch, but it's in the Northwest Quadrant of the 2x2 matrix of jocky assholes/rich d-bags for school team sports. The 2x2 consultants' matrix looks like this:
Jocky Assholes, Rich D-Bags (NW quadrant)
Lacrosse
Water Polo (Southern California only)
Swimming
Crew
Jocky Assholes, Regular Guys (NE quadrant)
Football
Basketball
Baseball
Wrestling
Weenie Shitfucks, Rich D-Bags (SW quadrant)
Squash
Tennis
Fencing
Golf
Soccer (white rich guys only)
Weenie Shitfucks, Regular Guys (SE quadrant)
Cross Country
Track and Field
Soccer (immigrants and normal guys)
There's some considerable regional variation for sports on the rich dbags/regular guys axis. Hockey varies a lot depending on where you are, as does lacrosse to some extent, etc etc.
Goes without saying that all are rapists, though the same is true for the non-sports playing guys as well. Fuck men. Fuck everyone.
No one is buying your backdoor apologia for crossfit, you spaz.
Crossfit people cover all categories at once, though they tend to be more middle-aged ex-athlete rapists than currently-on-a-college-team rapists.
The guy who tweeted the thing first underlined that phrase.
29: In practice, murder seems to be punished less harshly than rape.
This can vary a lot by state and time period. I don't know what Massachusetts statistics look like. When I was looking at California correction statistics back in the 90s, murder and attempted murder produced the longest times to first parole by far, while rape was in the tier below that. Since 1988, the California governor has had the authority to veto parole board decisions that grant parole to convicted murderers.
This veto reached a peak under Gray Davis, who only approved parole for two convicted murderers during his three years in office, both of which (IIRC) were battered women who were convicted of the murder of their abusers. I remember reading about the second one - she was a woman who had been beaten by her partner while she was pregnant, and had asked a male friend to beat up her partner to show him what it was like. Friend went too far and killed the guy, she was convicted under the felony murder rule, and got paroled after serving around 18 years. That's basically what it took to get paroled for murder under Davis.
The two subsequent governors have been much more lenient in affirming parole board decisions, particularly in the wake of a couple of court decisions creating more of a presumption in favor of parole, as this article describes. The article does have a major typo in that it says that "Davis reversed only two of 232 parole board decisions granting parole between 1999 and 2002," where it should say he *sustained* only two of the decisions. So I don't know what the overall statistics look like today, but I expect that murder is probably still punished more harshly than rape in CA in terms of jail terms. The article headline looks spectacular, but given the backlog of parole that had built up under previous governors, it's probably primarily about restoring a more reasonable balance to jail terms under Brown.
23 Isn't this judge up for election in November? Is he running unopposed?
23 Isn't this judge up for election in November? Is he running unopposed?
There's an effort to have him recalled.
"Aaron Persky is telling these women don't bother calling police. Even if you get through a trial and even if you manage to get a conviction, I will not impose a serious sanction," Dauber said.
Dauber said she would be launching a formal campaign this week to recall the judge from office, and a change.org petition calling for him to be removed has already garnered more than 45,000 signatures.
A spokesman for Santa Clara superior court said the judge was barred from commenting on this case while there is an appeal pending. After sentencing, Turner's attorneys notified court that they intend to appeal the conviction.
49: Where does ultimate frisbee fit into your theory?
58 In the same group as hacky sack no doubt.
57 Good. Would also like to see an effort to unseat him in November because I have (an admittedly uninformed) feeling that the effort to recall him will fail.
See 31 - I don't think the judge will appear on the November ballot.
If I read the recall rules correctly, they need about 80,000 signatures (10% of registered voters in that county) to put a recall on the ballot.
60 So he's running unopposed? Is it too late for someone to get on the ballot against him?
61: I'd say yes to both except I'm not sure how write-ins work. There's the concept of "qualified write-in" here, and maybe that has a later deadline?
CA Superior court judges aren't on the ballot every year and he's not up this year. They have 6 year terms.
63: I know, see my 31. FWIR his term actually would have been up but he's not on the ballot today or in November because nobody opposed him.
But interestingly the ballot where I am this morning had two Superior Court judgeships, and one of them had just one name and a blank as options, so I wonder if there's something else that could be going on that a challenger could use, like the qualified write-in thing, however that works. (Probably not if there was no opposition in the primary, though.)
More rape culture. I honestly can't tell if they're using "politically correct" as derogatory or not.