I keep trying to form a coherent comment to this story, but all I can come up with is a block of pissed-off curse words.
gee, i wonder if there’s anyone else at stanford who had their lives negatively impacted by the party culture there?
oh yeah-- his victim.
Maybe he should have thought about that before raping… oh you didn’t well sucks to be you.
I have no sympathy for this kid at all. While I have problems with how the sex offender list is used for things like public urination I got no problems with this guy being on it. Maybe not for life but oh he needs to be on it.
“I’ve lost my chance to swim in the Olympics.”
Um, yes that is true, and you raped a Woman too douche bag.
i just read something that is, possibly, even worse than turner’s statement above. this comes from a letter written to the judge by a woman who has been a friend of turner’s since childhood. i’ll leave it here without further comment except to say look at it. look at it–
“I don’t think it’s fair to base the fate of the next ten + years of his life on the decision of a girl who doesn’t remember anything but the amount she drank to press charges against him. I am not blaming her directly for this, because that isn’t right. But where do we draw the line and stop worrying about being politically correct every second of the day and see that rape on campuses isn’t always because people are rapists.”
I have some good Yiddish curses for occasions such as this.
זאָלן דײַנע ביינער זיך ברעכן אַזוי אָפֿט ווי די עשׂרת–הדיברות.
Zoln dayne beyner zikh brekhn azoy oft vi di Aseres-Hadibres.
May your bones be broken as often as the Ten Commandments.
Too harsh? How about this one?
לױפֿן זאָלסטו אין בית־הכּסא יעדע דרײַ מינוט אָדער יעדע דרײַ חדשים.
Loyfn zolstu in beys-hakise yede dray minut oder yede dray khadoshim.
May you run to the toilet every three minutes or every three months.
A personal favorite:
מגולגל זאָל ער װערן אין אַ הענגלײַכטער: בײַ טאָג זאָל ער הענגען און בײַ נאַכט זאָל ער ברענען.
Megulgl zol er vern in a henglaykhter: bay tog zol er hengen un bay nakht zol er brenen.
He should turn into a chandelier, so he’ll hang by day and burn by night.
Perfect. All I can do is get all angry and shouty.
The culture that promotes the idea that this is ok and maybe even lets you think doing these things not in terms of rape or sexual assault is not party culture or hookup culture or some culture of promiscuity. It’s also a culture that likes to deflect any cultural causes away from itself and at something else.
My Brother the prison guard’s personal wisdom. Indeed.
May the boys on the Cell Block never learn the true nature of your prison sentence.
So I’m thinking, what do we do with people in his position? Is he completely useless to society? Should he be just completely taken out? The death penalty is only bad because human beings are pretty bad at deciding who should die, but if this person isn’t going to be of any use to society, aren’t they better off dead? Cause I don’t think there’s anything he can possibly do that would reassure people that he actually felt bad about his actions. Or are we just in this middle ground of just sneering at him for the rest of his life. Because we do know that ostracizing other criminals doesn’t help them reintegrate. Or is all this anger because we have this idea his friends and family will essentially insulate him from any real consequence, so being angrier is our way of trying to get through to him.
This editorial by defense attorney and first amendment lawyer Ken White, of the Popehat Blog, covers this issue succinctly and from the perspective of someone who has been there:
So you won’t find defense lawyers like me cheering Brock Turner’s
escape from appropriate consequences. We see it as a grim reminder of
the brokenness of the system. We recognize it as what makes the system
impossible for many of our clients to trust or respect. And we know
that when there’s a backlash against mercy and lenient sentences – when
cases like this or the “affluenza” kid inspire public appetite for
longer sentences – it’s not the rich who pay the price. It’s the ones
who never saw much mercy to begin with.
There are two ways to see good fortune and bad fortune. You can say
“someone who has enjoyed good fortune should be held to a higher
standard, and someone who has suffered bad fortune should be treated
with more compassion.” But America’s courts are more likely to say
“someone who has enjoyed good fortune has more to lose, and someone who
has suffered bad fortune can’t expect any better.”
Judge Persky and his ilk can’t stop being human. But they are bound by oath to try to be fair. When a judge says you are very fortunate and therefore it would be too cruel to interrupt that good fortune just because you committed a crime, they are not being fair. For shame.
The San Jose Mercury News has some coherent comments, under the headline
Stanford sex offender Brock Turner’s court file shows he lied about drug use.
Here’s one quote: “But according to prosecutor Alaleh Kiancerci’s sentencing memo, texts and photos found on Turner’s cell phone, which police seized, indicate that he used alcohol and drugs in high school, well before the January 2015 assault. Kiancerci pointed out the lies to the judge during the sentencing hearing, but Persky did not comment on Turner’s dishonesty.”
This would be a good thing to read about that letter.
Oh darn he can’t go to the olympics, well as I stated above maybe he should have thought about that before raping another person.
If it means he spends his career saying ‘do you want fries with that?’ then good.
Sure, he could. He could honestly own up to what he did, and not try to blame the alcohol, or the culture, or the dancing, or anything else but himself. He wouldn’t be getting nearly as much vituperation if he (and his clueless old man) weren’t going on and on and on about how much he’s suffering and how awfully his poor life is being ruined by “these events that have transpired” (as opposed to, oh, I dunno, “this heinous crime that I committed”).
If he said something like, “I did a profoundly wrong and violent thing, I deeply regret doing it, but I did it and there is absolutely no excuse for it,” then he might actually be showing some actual remorse. Or at least pretending to.
What he’s saying now isn’t even trying.
Jeebus cripes, I hate seeing this guys face over and over again, although the smiling yearbook photo was actually worse, it had some insane creepiness to it that was even less endearing than his mug shot.
That is Biblically brutal. Keep these coming if you remember any more!
I un-liked your comment so I could like it twice.
No.
No, no, no, no.
Absolutely not.
The death penalty is bad because two wrongs don’t make a right.
The death penalty is bad because it turns everyone involved in the legal process — prosecutor, judge, jury, and executioner — into murderers. It damages the minds and souls of ordinary people.
The death penalty is bad because the State should not be able to decide who lives and who dies, as that power will inevitably used against the enemies of the State.
The death penalty is bad because we should be better than the people who we’re passing judgement upon.
I just cannot with this father-son-childhood friend response team. The juxtaposition of the victim’s heartbreaking, eloquent, gut-wrenching statement with the perpetrator’s entitlement and perverse rationale … I just taught my 5-year-old a new curse word for daycare by yelling at my computer screen.
