A friend of mine wrote this,
On the whole stanford sexual assault case - the people who are rightly upset about the sentence being too lenient are also people who are likely to want more lenient sentencing generally, repeal three strikes laws, and reduce mandatory minimum sentencing.
Pillorying a judge for giving a lenient sentence plays right into the hands of DAs and prison owners who would love to roll back recent efforts at sentencing reform. It’s going to scare every other superior court judge in California out of showing leniency to defendants and trap thousands more people in our prison system for longer than they otherwise might be, for fear that some tea party nut is going to challenge them from the right.
Unless everybody I know is really prepared to veer right on criminal sentencing generally, I’d suggest people take a different critique - that it’s unlikely this judge was as lenient with similarly situated offenders who are poor and/or of color, and insofar as that’s true, that’s the real problem.
On the other hand, it’s totally valid to want harsher mandatory minimum sentencing, but it’s important to realize it’s going to have the largest impact in cases where you find the defendant sympathetic. Bad rulings like this one are the unfortunate consequence of giving judges discretion to be lenient in the many cases where we’d want the judge to be able to do so.
This sentencing issue is analogous to the fourth amendment - yes, it’s unfortunate that the exclusionary rule means that guilty criminals go free because evidence was gathered unconstitutionally, but we are all better off in a system where that happens, even if it produces individual outcomes that are unjust and outrageous.
