California Judge Who Let Stanford Rapist Off Easy, Recalled by County Vote

Judge who ruled in sex assault case, recalled in Santa Clara County

By Bob Egelko 

Santa Clara County Superior Court Judge Aaron Persky was recalled

Photo: Jason Doiy / Associated Press

Santa Clara County Superior Court Judge Aaron Persky was recalled from office by the voters Tuesday, two years after he set off national outrage by sentencing a Stanford athlete to six months in jail for sexually assaulting and attempting to rape an unconscious woman.

With 43 percent of precincts reporting, 59 percent of the county’s voters favored recalling Persky while 41 percent opposed the recall. On the same ballot, Assistant District Attorney Cindy Hendrickson led civil rights lawyer Angela Storey, 70 to 30 percent, in the election to serve the last four years of Persky’s term.

Takeaway: Persky, a judge for 15 years, is the first California jurist to be recalled since 1932.

“This is a sad day for the California judiciary,” said LaDoris Cordell, a former Santa Clara County judge who was active in the campaign against the recall. She said the vote sends a message to judges that “if they don’t go along with popular opinion ... they can lose their job.”

When Judge Persky sentenced Brock Turner to 6 months for raping an unconscious girl - that was a sad day for the California judiciary. Maybe it's time judges learn that popular opinion is what it is because of pathetic decisions like the Brock Turner case. If they don't soon decide that rape is rape whether on a university campus or whether or not the victim is passed out - they should lose their job.

Henderson, Persky’s successor, has been a Santa Clara County prosecutor since 1995. She supported the recall and was endorsed by the campaign’s organizer.

“My goal was to give voters a meaningful choice in the recall election,” she said Tuesday night. She promised to “work really hard to gain the respect of my fellow judges.”

For the first time since 1977 people power has forced a sitting US judge out of office. In 2016 Judge Aaron Persky faced international criticism for giving ex-Stanford student Brock Turner a six-month jail term, He was found guilty of three felonies after sexually assaulting an unconscious woman, for which the law prescribed a minimum of two years. Long before the #MeToo movement exploded, the lenient sentence spurred Stanford law professor Michele Landis Dauber, a family friend of the victim, to launch the successful recall campaign.

Persky did not issue a statement after the vote. Organizers of the recall could not be reached for comment.

Background: Persky, 56, was a deputy district attorney who prosecuted sex crimes before Gov. Gray Davis appointed him to the bench in 2003. He won two new six-year terms without opposition and drew little public attention or criticism until 2016, when he presided over the sexual assault trial of Stanford student Brock Turner.

Turner, 19 at the time, was arrested after two graduate students on bicycles discovered him late one night in January 2015 lying on top of an unconscious woman and caught him when he tried to run away. Turner denied assaulting the 22-year-old woman, maintaining they had acted consensually after meeting at a fraternity party where both had been drinking heavily, but a jury convicted him of three felonies.

The crimes were punishable by up to 14 years in prison, and prosecutors sought a six-year sentence. But Persky noted that the court’s probation officer had recommended a jail sentence of a year or less after speaking with the victim. The judge also cited Turner’s youth and lack of a criminal record, the “severe impact” a prison term would have on him, and his obligation to register annually with police as a sex offender for the rest of his life.

The victim, identified only as Emily Doe, spoke at the sentencing hearing, telling Turner he had taken away “my worth, my privacy, my energy, my time, my safety, my intimacy, my confidence.” She said she considered the proposed jail sentence “an insult to me and all women.”

The statement went viral, galvanized women’s rights advocates, and touched off a campaign that generated nearly 100,000 signatures on recall petitions. It was also instrumental in the rapid enactment of a new state law requiring at least three years in prison for sexual penetration of an unconscious victim.

The recall campaign was organized by Michele Dauber, a Stanford law professor whose daughter was a friend of Emily Doe. Dauber accused Persky — a former Stanford lacrosse player — of bias in favor of athletes and affluent white defendants. In one of those cases, Persky allowed a man charged with domestic violence to go to Hawaii and try out for the college football team, and to return there after pleading guilty. In another, he gave a domestic violence defendant a jail sentence that allowed him to attend football practices.

The state Commission on Judicial Performance examined those cases, and Turner’s, and said they failed to show that Persky was biased. Turner’s sentence was within the bounds of the law, the commission said, and prosecutors had agreed to the other sentences or did not object to them.