SACRAMENTO, June 11 (UPI) — A group of California political leaders have announced they’ll work to raise money for a campaign to recall the judge who handed down the sentence in the Stanford University student’s rape case.
Assemblywoman Cristina Garcia of the California Legislative Women’s Caucus says she thinks the caucus’s political arm can raise $200,000 to recall Judge Aaron Persky, who sentenced Brock Turner to just six months in jail and three years’ probation for raping an unconscious woman behind a dumpster in 2015.
“We were outraged,” Garcia said of Persky’s sentencing. “When victims hear things like this, they think the system’s against them.”
Veteran Democratic political consultants Joe Trippi and John Shallman have also joined the recall effort, which was started by Stanford law professor Michele Dauber.
“It’s quite remarkable,” Dauber, who is a family friend of the victim, told the Los Angeles Times of the effort. “It shows the kind of watershed moment that this really is.”
Dauber says she believes about 70,000 signatures of Santa Clara County voters would be needed to force a recall election as Persky, a Santa Clara County Superior Court judge won a new six-year term on the bench running unopposed in Tuesday’s primary election.
Activists delivered nearly one million signatures on a flashdrive to a judicial commission on Friday as part of a symbolic show of support for the recall.
The Santa Clara County Bar Association released a statement defending Persky, arguing against the existence of any “credible assertions” that his sentence “violated the law or his ethical obligations or acted in bad faith.”
