A move is underway to oust the California judge who sparked outrage after he sentenced a former Stanford University swimmer to just six months in jail for raping an unconscious woman behind a dumpster outside a campus frat party.
The sentence Santa Clara County Superior Court Judge Aaron Persky imposed on Brock Turner, 20, has been blasted by the victim as a “mockery of the seriousness of his assault” and called a “slap on the wrist” by the San Jose Mercury News
And critics like Stanford law professor Michele Dauber said she can’t fathom what Persky, a former Santa Clara County prosecutor who specialized in going after violent sexual predators, was thinking.
“The judge had to bend over backwards to accommodate this young man,” Dauber said.
“I believe that many people believe that assaults that happen on campus are less serious that assaults that happen elsewhere.”
Dauber, who is a family friend of the victim identified only as “Emily Doe,” said she suspects that the judge went easy on Turner because they have similar backgrounds.
“I think he was very persuaded by the background of the young man as an elite athlete,” she said in a brief interview with NBC News.
Turner was once an Olympic hopeful. Persky, who also attended Stanford, was captain of the school’s lacrosse team when he was an undergraduate and also helped coach the lacrosse team while attending Berkeley law school, according to biographical information he supplied in 2002 to the League of Women Voters of California.
In their recall petition, Change.org noted that “Judge Persky failed to see that the fact that Brock Turner is a white male star athlete at a prestigious university does not entitle him to leniency. He also failed to send the message that sexual assault is against the law regardless of social class, race, gender or other factors.”
Persky, 54, did not immediately return a call for comment about his controversial sentence or the drive to remove him from the bench.









