But, in a country in which the law is unnecessarily harsh most of the time. Is removing a judge for a light sentence really the trend we want to start?

https://www.vox.com/first-person/2018/6/6/17434694/persky-brock-turner-recall-california-stanford-rape-sentencing

@1

Congratulations on the stupidest comment of the month.

Good, good, good.
@2: I donno, it's only the first week of June. Benjamin needs to pace himself.

wow. thanks guys! form the article, written by a public defender...

"I am not arguing that Turner’s sentence was the right one. Indeed, as a public defender, I am all too aware of the racial and class disparities in sentencing that redounded to Turner’s benefit. I have previously written about the ways privileged criminal defendants often are rewarded precisely because of their privileges. (One need look no further than Harvey Weinstein, who easily posted bail and did not spend a day in jail after his arrest.) But allowing an uninformed public to punish a judge for one unpopular decision jeopardizes the integrity of our entire system."

Good. The era of the slap on the wrist for members of the "privileged boys" club is OVER. The public spoke, the judge got canned for treating a criminal like an innocent little boy. Keep your hands out of other people's pants and you should be fine. And #1, you're being obtuse and stupid.

While Persky's sentencing in the Turner case was fucked up, I fear the precedent this establishes. Persky was up for re-election in 2022. The people could've spoken then.

I was sentenced to 5 years in the state reform school at 15 for breaking into an abandoned Safeway and living in the back. (Instead of sleeping by the railroad tracks).

Where was this god damned judge when I needed him?

5 et. al. Why the personal attacks? How does that make your point? "obtuse and stupid" when I linked to the reasoned comments of an actual public defender?

If you want harsher sentences for everyone just say so. Because that is the effect of this recall.
If Vox isn't lefty enough for you, maybe listen to Reason?

https://reason.com/blog/2018/06/06/recall-aaron-persky-brock-turner-stanfor

"The window to punish Turner has shut. The next person to come before a California judge might be a far less privileged defendant, hoping for mercy and less likely to get it."

@#7, as others have stated much more eloquently. When was the last time a judge got recalled for a sentence that was too severe? Or got recalled when and innocent man was exonerated and the judge should have known the case was horrible?

@9. Privilege or hardship should have nothing to do with sentencing a sex offender. They should all get thrown in prison for as long as the law allows.

@10 agreed completely.

@13:

Maybe, if you stopped responding to your own comments people might take you just a teensy bit more seriously...

People always wring their hands about what precedent this sets, but this is only the second recall in a century. If CA starts recalling judges every year then we can talk about reform. As it is now it looks like the public removed a judge who exercised poor... judgement.

As long as judges are elected they are going to need to look over their shoulder to see whether the voters approve of the job they are doing. That can have bad consequences like when bias results in harsher sentences for minorities but is also essential to maintaining the norms of our society. Without it you get the obscenity.

i saw that too late! darn it. I meant 12 and 7 but they new that i think.

and 16, he has to register as a sex offender for life i believe....

Benjamin, you're being called obtuse because you're completely ignoring the context around this judge and bringing up your barely-ancillary issue at a completely inappropriate time. I can't help but wonder if you bring up woman on man rape on feminist threads too.

And 16 a fucking piece of shit for thinking 6 months is lenient for raping an unconscious woman in an alley

@19 Ah. “Daddy” likes to be super fair to rapists and Nazis. It’s real important to him.

No, see, you wait until the fourth or fifth rape before you do something as inhumane as restrict a rapists freedom to rape for any amount longer than a season of Game of Thrones.

Of course that time varies by the amount money in the bank and lack of melanin the rapist possesses. The less money and darker the skin the more humane it is to lock them up for more than a school semester.

Rape victims... well, they shouldn’t just pass out and leave their vaginas lying around like that.

Stranger comment threads are better than this usually. Jumping down someone's throat for citing vox? Please people, chill. Vox certainly counts as woke.

Given the US system and given the opportunity I would have voted to throw out this judge. But that is a dangerous game.

Want a judge to stick up for minority rights tland be thrown out by the majority?

"But won’t somebody PLEASE think of the poor white men?"

No-one gives a rat's ass about Persky in particular. It's the institution that this threatens.

Judges are given a very great deal of independence for a reason. We DON'T want judges to be responsive to the electorate: that's the function of the executive and legislative branches. We want judges to be responsive to the law and to equity. And the only way to ensure that is to keep the grubby hands of the politicians and the people off of them.

Put it this way: Donald Trump is a populist and a demogogue. One of the very few parts of government that has been offering him any resistance whatsoever has been the judiciary. Even when he rails against them in his tweets, they continue to do their job. Now why are they standing up to him when Congress isn't?

Because Congress is responsive to voters and judges are not. Judicial independence is absolutely essential to a well-functioning republic.

Do you want to live in a society where some oligarch can come along and whip up a recall campaign against a judge that's prepared to rule against him in a case he's waging in court?

Do you want to live in a society where Roy Moore can get voted on to the bench of the state Supreme Court?

Because that's what you get when you politicize the judiciary.

Persky screwed up big time. And yes, in justice, I would probably agree that he shouldn't be on the bench. But the institution is vastly bigger and more important than him. And this case here deals a massive blow to that institution. It's like cutting off your arm to cure a hangnail.

Because I 100% guarantee that Perksy won't be the last judge to go this way. And the next one may very well be the one protecting immigrant rights or same-sex marriage.

Over and over, sentences are handed down to "send a message." Persky's ruling was in keeping with the long-standing message that affluent white men will be treated leniently. The rapist knew it. The rapist's father knew it. Everyone of the 'character witnesses' who supported the rapist knew it. That message has been sent, repeatedly, by the judicial system, to where it so reinforced that people still have a hard time denying its truth.

Now the voters in CA have sent their own message. The judges of America better wake up to it.

I think the judge erred in allowing this ridiculous case to go to trial. An adult woman consumes so much alcohol that she loses consciousness and later claims to have no recollection of the ensuing events. At some point she has sexual contact with a teenage athlete who has been illegally supplied with a large amount of liquor. When witnesses encounter the pair the male is obviously drunk and the woman is unresponsive. So the teenager is a sex offender?

Was it ever shown that another judge wouldn't have handed out a similar sentence? I'm inclined to suspect the Pesky didn't give a sentence outside the normal range for the crime Turner was actually convicted of (my understanding of the case is that he was fingering her?). It's fair to take issue with the judge's comments but I don't find much reason to believe that any other judge would have delivered justice.

@27 that's some pretty fine hair splitting and ignores the purpose of judicial independence. The idea is to allow judges to make decisions without regard to if they are popular or not. If a judge can lose their seat for making unpopular rulings, what difference does it make if it's through a recall or if they are fired for political reason - it still has the same effect on the judiciary.

@26 thanks for trolling. I, as much if not moreso than other posters here on SLOG, have noted that women under the influence are routinely sexually aggressive and assertive and it shouldn't be a crime to have sex with someone who has the wherewithal to ask for it.

However, basically every account says that the victim in this case was pass out drunk, in no shape to do anything. This isn't a case where someone made a decision because they were drunk that they later regretted, she didn't make a decision at all.

@29 that might be literally what the term means - but do you think that public recall (and election) of judges serves the purposes of judicial independence?