After the Brock Turner Case, Would Recalling Judge Aaron Persky Really Achieve Anything?

UltraViolet also paid for a plane to fly over Stanford’s graduation, dragging a banner that read “Protect Survivors. Not Rapists. #PerskyMustGo,” and helped organize an open letter to the California Commission on Judicial Permission from Stanford alumni, which said that sentences like those from Persky discourage victims from reporting:

This attitude significantly undermines the impact that rape has on survivors, and contributes to an already pervasive problem: survivors are hesitant to report sexual assault. In fact, fewer than one-third of rapes are ever reported. And when one in four college women is sexually assaulted, attitudes like that of Judge Persky mean far too many rapists have impunity.

In a press release, the group said they will also purchase a billboard on a state highway in the Bay Area calling for Persky’s ouster. (You can see an image of the billboard design here.)

But as NBC points out, online petitions have no legal weight at all. A different recall effort backed by the Progressive Women Silicon Valley State PAC is trying to push a ballot measure that would allow voters to consider whether to recall Persky, although that, too, is historically difficult to achieve.

The larger question, though, is whether Persky is actually significantly worse than other judges on sexual assault. The Associated Press found that Persky tends to follow sentencing recommendations made by the probation department. The Santa Clara County Bar Association argues that threatening Persky’s job is a threat to judicial independence, and weighs just one of his 13 years of decisions too heavily, saying they see “no credible assertions that in issuing the sentence, Judge Persky violated the law or his ethical obligations or acted in bad faith.”

And a group of public defenders, as the Marshall Project reports, are arguing that the backlash against Persky could end up hurting their own, mostly poor black and Latino clients. Their concern is that the Persky backlash will scare or goad judges into imposing unduly harsh sentences. Deputy Public Defender Sajid Khan wrote in a blog post that the call for Persky’s removal is a symptom of a larger issue:

This culture of mass incarceration has so shaped our minds that when a judge, like Judge Persky in this case, undertakes a holistic sentencing analysis that accounts for both the victim and the convicted, we still insist on arbitrary, lengthy terms of incarceration as the response to crime.

Mass incarceration is largely a result of judges who have either not utilized discretion in sentencing or who have been deprived by state legislatures of discretion. This lack of discretion has manifested in draconian sentences and overfilled prisons. Rather than using robotic, one size fits all punishment schemes, we want judges, like Judge Persky, to engage in thoughtful, case by case, individualized determinations of the appropriate sentence for a particular crime and particular offender.

It’s tough to tell what longer-term impacts the Turner case might have on either rape sentences or Persky’s own career. The DA’s office confirmed that they did ask for him to be replaced on an upcoming sexual assault trial. Persky is up for reelection in November, but no one has filed to run against him yet.

UltraViolet and other groups clearly see that the public is deeply, passionately invested in this particular case, uniquely outraged by its outcome. They clearly believe that they have an opportunity to shift the cultural conversation here, to send a direct and unequivocal message about how we should adjudicate rape. But fixating on Persky as the problem, to the exclusion of every other factor—and without addressing the culture that creates thousands of Brock Turners and will create thousands more—might not result in the solution we need.