The outrage over the Stanford University rape case isn't going away: A Change.org petition calling for Santa Clara County Superior Court Judge Aaron Persky to be removed from the bench for his lenient sentence in the case is gaining momentum and now has more than 200,000 signatures. Persky sentenced former student Brock Turner to six months in county jail for sexually assaulting an unconscious woman. The 20-year-old could have been given more than 10 years in prison. The petition was started by nurse Maria Ruiz, who tells Reuters that she was outraged when she heard about the sentence. "Honestly, I was terribly upset," she says. "As soon as I heard about it I jumped on the computer and I was like, 'I have to do something.'" More:
- New York notes that Turner's case may have been helped by the fact that authorities didn't release his mugshots until Monday, allowing him to be presented as "a well-dressed college athlete instead of the convicted felon." A booking photo from the night of his arrest can be seen here.
- In a statement, Stanford said it "did everything within its power to assure that justice was served in this case," including imposing the "harshest sanction" it could on Turner, and that the release of mugshots was up to the sheriff's office.
- New York observes the university's Department of Public Safety and the Santa Clara Sheriff's Office "seemed to be volleying the responsibility for releasing the mugshot back and forth." The latter released the photo from Turner's sentencing day, and the former provided one from the night of the assault.
- On CNN, meanwhile, the victim's extraordinarily powerful court statement was read aloud Monday by Ashleigh Banfield, who spent 20 minutes of her Legal View show reading all but the most graphic parts of the 7,000-word statement, the Huffington Post reports.
(A statement from Turner's father
describing the attack as "20 minutes of action" has been strongly criticized.)
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