* In 2016, Brock Turner [white], a former swimmer at Stanford University, was convicted of sexually assaulting [fingering] an unconscious [asian] woman outside of a fraternity party. Two passersby saw the nineteen-year-old freshman thrusting upon an immobile, partially unclothed woman, next to a dumpster, and restrained him while they called the police. At Turner’s sentencing hearing, the woman, known in court proceedings as Emily Doe, read a victim-impact statement that addressed him directly: “You don’t know me, but you’ve been inside of me, and that’s why we’re here today.” BuzzFeed published the entire statement, which went viral.
The Santa Clara County Superior Court judge, Aaron Persky, sentenced Turner to six months in jail, three years of probation, and lifetime sex-offender registration, saying that a longer prison term “would have a severe impact on him.” (The maximum sentence that Turner could have received was fourteen years in prison.) The leniency of the sentence, along with Doe’s viral statement, ignited widespread fury. Soon afterward, Michele Dauber, a professor at Stanford Law School, launched a campaign to remove Persky, an elected trial judge, from his job, through a recall election.
* The anti-Persky campaign also drew liberal critics, who anticipated that a movement to remove a judge for being insufficiently punitive in a criminal case would bring troubling unintended consequences. The retired judge LaDoris Cordell, a feminist who, in the nineteen-eighties, became the first Black woman judge appointed in Northern California and, later, an elected superior-court judge in the same county as Persky, participated in a campaign against the recall. She said, at the time, “I’m opposed to it because I believe this recall is terrible for racial justice.” She and others believed that it would make judges less independent and, in particular, more afraid to be lenient. Such reluctance would breed more punitiveness and harm Black and Latino defendants, who are severely overrepresented in the criminal-justice system.
* They found that, immediately after the public announcement of the Persky-recall campaign, judges began imposing sentences that were roughly thirty per cent longer on average, across the board. Those increases maintained preëxisting racial disparities. In other words, even though the Persky-recall campaign aimed to raise consciousness about white privilege, the additional years in prison were disproportionately imposed on Black and Hispanic people.
* Around the time of Persky’s firing from his tennis-coach position, in 2019, Emily Doe revealed her identity as Chanel Miller and published a memoir, “Know My Name,” about the sexual assault and its aftermath, including the criminal case. Her memoir won the National Book Critics Circle Award for autobiography.
WIKIPEDIA: On the evening of January 17, 2015, Miller accompanied her sister to a Kappa Alpha fraternity party at Stanford University; later that night, two Stanford graduate students found Miller lying on the ground behind a dumpster with another Stanford student, 19-year-old Brock Turner, on top of her.[14] Miller was unconscious,[15] her blood alcohol level was estimated to have been 0.22% at the time of the assault.[16][17] When Turner tried to flee, he was caught and held down on the ground by the two graduate students as they waited for police to arrive.[18] Turner was arrested and indicted on five felony sexual assault charges, to which he pleaded not guilty.
