Except in this case, the judge was following a recommendation from the local county probation office. While those recommendations aren’t binding on a court, it is an indication of the range of sentence that others thought were available. The function of those recommendations is to provide a viewpoint from officials who are involved in the criminal justice system and are knowledgeable about sentencing options, and who are separate from that of the prosecutor and the defence.
The message that the recall sends is that judges should err on the side of more severe sentences if they want to keep their jobs. As ** Bricker** notes upthread, how often is there public outcry that a sentence is too harsh and the judge should be removed for being too hard on the accused? “Tough on crime” keeps judges in office.
Again, when you say his “biases”, you have to include the “biases” of the local probation office which recommended a lenient sentence.
A better approach, it seems to me, is that the prosecution should have the right to appeal a sentence that strikes them as out of line with the normal range and the facts of the case. The appellate courts should have the power to correct a sentence, whether it’s too lenient or too harsh.
But the judge’s security of tenure shouldn’t be affected because they made a mistake in sentencing. Removal should be limited to cases of clear misconduct, not for errors in judgment.
I think it’s a good thing that judges can make unpopular decisions, if the facts and the law calls for it. Mistakes, if any, can be corrected by the appeals process.
The thing is, the public had no other outlet to let the judge (and other officials) know that this was unacceptable that would have been meaningful. Right now, Americans are fucking fed up with a non-responsive government. And this is something that cannot be undone at this point, so the only thing the public can do is indicate that this is substantially unacceptable. The judge had to lose his job and now the county probation people who made the recommendation and legislators all know that the public thinks that this is SO unacceptable that they will ruin at least one of your lives, just like that young ladies life was ripped apart, except you’ll know that this happened because of what you did, where what happened to her had nothing to do with what she did.
It’s a terrible, harsh lesson, but at this time, IMO, the public decided that there was no other meaningful, impactful way to make this clear to the powers that be.
The public did have another outlet: put pressure on the legislature to clarify the appropriate sentence and also to add a full right of appeal for prosecutors.
Removing one judge pour encourager les autres is not a systemic fix for the problem. Far better to have a built-in remedy that doesn’t require mobilising public action as in this case, but rather leave it to the regular professional judgment of the prosecutors, who could appeal a too-lenient sentence without needing massive public action.
While ignoring the recommendation from the prosecution, who had requested a sentence 12 times as long. Also an indication of what others in the justice system thought was appropriate. That (ex-)Judge chose the more lenient recommendation, and he paid for it when the public found that unacceptable.
Now the public needs to make it clear to probation officer Monica Lassettre that rape is not acceptable anymore. She (and her boss, Laura Garnette) are the ones who actually signed the probation report on Brock Turner. It’s in their probation office where the bias in favor rich white fratboy rapists resides, and needs to be rooted out.
What part of “Right now, Americans are fucking fed up with a non-responsive government” was unclear? In this case, the public was outraged enough that they sent a clear and compelling signal by firing the judge.
A clear, compelling and *completely legal *signal, it should be stressed. If it has a chilling effect on other judges when they contemplate going easy on affluenziatic Stanford boys who’ve been found guilty of sex crimes - well, good.
Wow, sentencing is a State issue here as well as a Federal issue, depending on the jurisdiction. We don’t allow prosecutors to appeal criminal cases in either. Pesky Constitution and all.
And deferring to professional judgement by prosecutors doesn’t make any sense in this case. The prosecutor in this very case wanted 6 years, while the judge reduced it to 6 months. What’s more, legal people (particularly public defenders) were all about defending this guy’s actions. So the professional judgement is either being ignored or the professionals were ignoring the law.
Of course neither the law change nor the recall by itself fixes the system. And, hell, both together probably won’t. But it is a strong first step towards telling judges that they better fucking learn to care about the rape victims, and not put concerns about the rapist in front of that.
Fortunately, in the time since this started, it doesn’t seem like any other judges have this problem. And it took 80 years for the judge to be recalled. So the big hullabaloo about judges being harmed seems to be irrelevant.
All that happened here was that a judge who was defiant in the face of what we the people want, as encoded in our laws, got removed from his position. He had plenty of time to say “Now that I realize how the people want the law to be tougher on rapists like this, I would sentence differently.”
Instead, he decided that he was above the law, and thus we the people who made the law had to recall him.
I obviously disagree with the sentence, which was outrageously lenient. But recalling a judge will have its own consequences, such as putting pressure on judges to impose harsher sentences. This is why I’m generally opposed to electing judges and other members of the criminal justice system. Criminal justice should be free of political influences and concerns about political ramifications.
What is your proposed solution to the problem of sentencing being excessively wealth-dependent, then? If a judge isn’t administering justice impartially, what is to be done about it?
You lament societal pressure, calling it “political”, but that’s where our concept of justice comes from.
I get what you’re saying, and there’s no disagreement that in this particular case, there were multiple failures to protect the victim, from the parole board to the judge himself.
But this is exactly the kind of thing that leads to 3 strikes laws, mandatory minimum sentencing, and draconian overreactions that end up warehousing people. Willie Horton cost Michael Dukakis and Democrats the presidency. It also is the reason that Bill Clinton and moderate Democrats, at the urging of more fiercely pro-prison Republicans, implemented policies that devastated millions of people, particularly minorities over the past 25 years. There’s been bipartisan agreement that this trend needs to be reversed. But Judges, DAs, and attorneys general react to a case like this, and it makes it more likely that they will ignore mitigating circumstances in criminal cases of all kinds, not wanting to be viewed as soft on crime.
As Piper said, there are better ways to respond to this outrage.
Thus far, courts of justice have proven not capable of producing change via internal self governance. That’s what the public sees, again and again. Judge behaves badly, quiet reprimand. Zero consequences, zero change. The message the public wants to see sent, is not.
This is the only mechanism open to the public. And they are hoping they’ve been heard. As we’re talking about it, I’m going to say it’s been, in part at least, a success.
I’m sorry, but I find the idea that judges appointed through the political process are free of politics ridiculous. In fact, its corrupt political machines like Tammany Hall that make elected judges the far lesser of two evils.
I didn’t say that they were free of bias or politics (as clearly the Supreme Court demonstrates on a regular basis). Rather, I am merely suggesting that we’re better off having judges analyzing facts and circumstances of each case, rather than factoring in how they’re going to be perceived. I’m not saying judges shouldn’t concern themselves with perceptions, particularly in cases where they’ve rendered poor decisions, such as this one. But judges need to make decisions that are based on established legal precedents and guidelines, and not popular opinion. You can certainly argue that that wasn’t what happened in this particular case and that the judge failed miserably - I never disagreed with that. I’m just pointing out that intervening in the criminal justice system out of anger has consequences, and unlike one sensational case like Brock Turner or Willie Horton, these consequences will impact not one, but potentially thousands, tens of thousands, and even millions of people. And also unlike this case, their cases probably won’t be heard on TV or talked about on social media. Few people will ever know or talk about their suffering.
I tend to think more of the outrage in this case was aimed at the “But he’s a good kid who gets good grades and is on the swim team, so don’t ruin his life” bit, which seemed to influence the sentencing. That was Brock and his attorney portraying him as the victim here, which is outrageous. He ruined his own damned life as well as harming another. Whether he’s on the swim team or on a rocket ride to stardom shouldn’t mean a goddamned thing in sentencing.
My argument (or, more accurately, the argument of the writers whose works I have linked above) is that it will have a disproportionately chilling effect on poor and minority population. It’s unclear to me why you’d emphasize the chilling effect you hope it will have on affluenziatic Stanford boys, except that this is the effect you desire and you don’t wish to confront the potential effect you don’t desire – or don’t wish to acknowledge you desire, or to which you are indifferent.
I just want to make sure we’re all on the same page: that this judge was so damn muddle-headed that he didn’t get it, and by all indications is so muddle-headed that he still doesn’t; and that other judges — who are of course presumed to be so damn muddle-headed that we grant that they’ll likewise fail to get why this judge got his walking papers — will surely learn the wrong lesson and react the wrong way.
Is that the consensus we’re all cheerfully starting with, such that we can then ask whether enough bad decisions will thereby become good ones to outweigh the good decisions that will thereby become bad ones?
Tel you what: when this happens, when a judge starts sentencing people to long terms and cites this case as his reason why, post about it and maybe it’ll be enough that some of us will re-evaluate things in light of the new evidence.