http://heavy.com/news/2016/06/aaron-persky-brock-turner-judge-stanford-recall-petition-election-photos-sentence/

seems to vaguely reasonably cover the argument.

The judge likes sport is an argument?

The judge went to the same school and did sports there, which particular subculture is full of entitled gits who think that raping an unconscious woman isn't really rape, is an argument.

As for apparently repentant, I'm not sure where you got *that* from. The rapist admitted to being drunk, but wasn't repentant about anything else, and in fact tried to claim the woman consented.

The judge said he was, and the judge has had the benefit of being in this court paying close attention to these things. His perspective on this, I would argue, trumps my own.

The judge went to the same educational establishment as the victim as well, I take it? The notion that the judge was lenient because both he and the guilty party joined a sports club is ridiculous. He is a judge, not a five year old.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/06/07/how-judge-aaron-persky-went-from-battling-sexual-predators-to-coddling-one.html

Also, Turner is appealing the case. Does that sound like the actions of a remorseful fellow? No. Just the actions of someone who is sad he got caught.

From the bottom of that article, I note that the DA in charge disagrees pretty strongly:

“The punishment does not fit the crime.” He went on, “The predatory offender has failed to take responsibility, failed to show remorse, and failed to tell the truth. The sentence does not factor in the true seriousness of this sexual assault, or the victim’s ongoing trauma.”

It sounds like someone who doesn't want to go to prison. You can be remorseful at the same time as disputing your degree of punishment. I'm surprised you'd suggest otherwise.

To actually answer @bb - basically judges do often have a lot of sentencing leeway - for good reason. Sometimes it *is* justified to give people lighter sentences or heavier sentences, depending on the specifics of the case. But it seems pretty clear that an awful lot of people don't think it's justified in this case, including many with relevant professional legal opinion to be had.

I don't really know what a district attorney is. It's not a term used in the British system.

Remorse actually requires one to admit you did something wrong. Which, from everything reported, it is clear that Turner did not. No guilty plea, no admission that he in fact did rape the woman, his supposed remorseful future community service involves talking to people at college about how drinking ruins lives (with no mention of how actually, maybe raping people ruins lives), etc. That's not remorse. That's just excusing oneself and pretending to be sorry. And if you read the letter from his dad, it's pretty clear where he got the entitled rapey attitude from.

The DA is essentially the head of the State prosecution team. The DA quoted there is the boss of the lawyer who ran the prosecution case. (I'm not in the USA either so I don't have a better explanation.)

In the UK, Oct, our Crown Prosecution Service has the same role that the District Attorneys have in the US, roughly.

I have to admit that doesn't sound much like remorse to me, but I have no evidence that suggests that the judge hasn't simply acted on superior evidence to what is available to me.

As far as his father goes, I don't see how that's particularly relevant. The world in which we all share our father's opinions is not the world I recognise.

No, of course we're not all just children parroting our parents opinions. :-) It's just pretty clear in this case that the apple didn't fall far from the tree, so to speak.

I haven't seen the facts of the case reported anywhere. He was convicted of sexual assault. While despicable I don't think it is the same as rape.

I think you might find that the legal definition of "sexual assault" in most jurisdictions comes under the general definition of "rape" in most people's common english.

I found the victims letter. It was rape.

"Remorse actually requires one to admit you did something wrong."

That might be true, but one does not have to admit doing something illegal.

I don't know this case, but I know you can have remorse about things you consider legal as well.

http://kron4.com/2016/06/07/ex-stanford-swimmers-rape-victim-reads-letter/

Steephie, if you are being prosecuted under the law and you don't admit to the illegality of your act, you are not going to garner any sympathy from a legal expert called a judge. Mind blowing, right?

@bo Except if you're a rich white sports bro from the same college as the rich white sports bro judge, then maybe the judge will make excuses like oh no yeah life is so hard for rich white sports bros from college who've been convicted of rape we should let him off lightly. Nothing to see here, please move on.

I have no issue with expressing lenience toward someone with no criminal record at all let alone a violent criminal record. Obviously, this was way too much lenience, but as much as I don't want to excuse the judge, the bigger issues in this case are the media portrayal and the handling of the matter by the school.

I'm a rich white kid in a rich white college. Life isn't hard. I'm privileged as fuck. I hope that I would get quite a bit more than 6 months for rape. The judge expressed sympathy because he was more in tune with the perpetrator's suffering than the victim, had more time to communicate with and "understand" the perpetrator than the victim, and excused the perpetrator because he was drunk and because he isn't a threatening or violent looking person. It's a backwards thing that a lot of people do. So yeah, race and class are definitely part of it.

Steephie got a rational reply out of me. I guess that makes me smarter than this judge.

@bo: I wasn't talking about garnering sympathy though. I'm saying you can in fact have remorse about something without thinking you're guilty of the charge. I'm only arguing against the argument that no guilty plea automatically means no remorse.

Sure, you can have remorse for something that isn't the thing you're charged with. But that's got nothing to do with whether that should be taken into account when you're found guilty. I mean, he's probably remorseful that he didn't run away fast enough, or pick a better place to hide the unconscious victim whilst he did the deed. But he is pretty clearly not remorseful about actually raping someone.

I decided to actually read the letter from the victim. It's definitely rape, but it seems apparent that the perpetrator is just not really getting that it's rape. He can still very much be remorseful about doing what he did (the actions he took which we clearly see as rape) without realising it's rape. I'm more being technical here to be honest, though.

I agree that this perpetrator seems more concerned about himself, but that leaves a psychological question. He seems mostly unaware of her suffering, unless this is just his lawyer convincing him to not admit anything illegal. This can really go several ways as far as the psychology of this boy goes. You'd have to have been in that court for a good guess I'd say. Something is undeniably wrong with him though. Normal people don't do this.

It's a horrible case for the victim. His 'innocent' play adds a lot of pain for her.

So much plays into this decision.

Locking someone up 'who has no previous criminal record' seems like a bad idea to this judge because he could become a 'productive' member of society. Basically being seen as wealthy, educated, white, and privileged in all these ways means you would be wasted in prison.

The fact is the prison system doesn't rehabilitate people, worse, in the US it exposes them to criminals, it prevents them from obtaining work even after release, and basically guarentees criminal activity in the future - this is pretty much the opposite of rehabilitation. The system in place needs radical reform.

And this judge, recognising the problem, reinforces it by way of this classist&racist sentence. Never-mind the inherent misogyny...

Look at how the sexual assault and groping in Colonge was reported in the media at new years. When it is non-white men raping white women it gets the media attention it deserves; but there is an inherent misogynistic and racist assumption that white men have an entitlement to sex with white women (thus non-white men are defiling 'our property', so the outrage over the Colonge attaks was massively amplified)

This case highlights that entitlement to sex. So misogyny, racism and classism can be tied up all together in a neat like ball of privilege and power.

@Brainbomb, why did he get off so easy? Structural and Institutional privilege.

Being a young man who the judge could imagine as a younger version of himself would have helped a lot...

I am trying to understand your point of view, ora, but I truly can't follow it.

The US prison system is broken and makes the situation worse, yet by not handing out a longer jail term the judge is being misogynistic, classist, and racist?

I'm not only missing something, I think I'm missing everything. What exactly would you have wanted the judge to do?

I don't know. But when a judge hands out different sentences to people based on class or race it is classist or racist (or both).

If we're talking about the same case, the judges rational was that he didn't want to put this kid into a broken prison system which would leave him as a hardened criminal on the other end.

The fact is the system needs to be reformed. Maybe he wouldn't have given such a light sentence for this crime if the system wasn't so borked. Or an effective rehabilitation program existed...

But the question asked was why this happened. Why? Well you can easily answer that the laws in place were designed with imaginary bad guys in mind. This guy didn't fit that mould.

I said nothing about what i wanted to happen. You can work out for yourself what you think should happen.