Aaron Persky, a former judge, is back in the news because a swimmer he sided with in a sexual assault case is now making women on TikTok angry.
He seems to be working in his home city, but he can be found in bars. It’s not clear if it’s because of something he did or something he did in the past. No matter what the reason is, netizens think he shouldn’t be out in public.
Where is Aaron Persky, the judge? Relationship to politics
In 2018, people in Santa Clara County, California, tried to get Aaron Persky, the judge who gave former Stanford University swimmer Brock Turner a six-month sentence for sexual assault and caused an uproar across the country, removed from office.
The recall of Superior Court Judge Aaron Persky was called for all of a sudden, and 43 percent of the county’s voters went to the polls. Of those who voted, 59 percent backed the recall, while 41 percent were against it. Persky was the first judge in California to be called back after 86 years.
The campaign to get rid of Persky was led by women who were upset with Turner’s light sentence and thought he shouldn’t be allowed to serve the rest of his four-year sentence. Persky’s supporters say that a recall would threaten the independence of the courts and could lead to harsher sentences for criminals with much less privilege.
After the campaign was a success, Mr. Persky applied to be the junior varsity girls’ tennis coach over the summer. In 2019, he was hired after passing a background check that included a fingerprint scan. He went to several clinics for teaching kids how to play tennis and has a good rating from the USTA, which makes him a good candidate for the job.
He was also fired from this job, though. Change.org started a petition that day asking for Mr. Persky to be fired from his new job and accusing school administrators of letting a culture of rape take over while knowing about it. So, Lynbrook High School in San Jose told him he was no longer welcome there.
In 2022, Judge Aaron Persky is living his own life, out of the spotlight of the media. Twitter users keep thinking about him and want to know where he is, but they can’t find him.
Brock Turner Today: Aaron Persky’s Favorite Sexual Offender
Brock Turner is all over TikTok once more right now. Girls are warning each other about how often he goes to bars in the area. People are asked on Facebook not to let him go with a drunk woman.
Even though Vice says that all Turner might have to do is re-register on a list of sex offenders, it’s not clear why this is happening right now. It’s also possible that women looked him up on Google after meeting him recently at a party. But some people have started telling others his address and telling them not to listen to him.
Turner will work for a company that makes cooling technology in his home state of Ohio in 2022. At his first job, he makes $12 an hour. He lives with his parents in Bellbrook, Ohio, and drives a 2008 Chrysler.
Turner’s probation ended in 2019, but he will always be on a list of people who have committed sexual crimes. Most analysts agreed that Turner should have been punished more harshly than what Aaron Persky did.
He may not have been in jail as long as some people thought he should have been, but he will be on the list of criminals for the rest of his life.
How I grew up and went to school
In 1962, Michael Aaron Persky was born
Murray Persky was a psychiatrist and was his son’s father. Susan Elder, his mother, taught French. His grandfather’s parents ran a chicken business. He grew up in the California city of San Francisco.
Persky got his bachelor’s degree in international relations from Stanford University in 1984, where he was a member of Phi Beta Kappa.
He was the leader of the club lacrosse team for men at Stanford. In 1985, he went to Stanford and got a master’s degree in international policy studies.
He got his law degree from UC Berkeley’s Boalt Hall School of Law in 1990 and was allowed to practice law in California that same year. After college, he played on and was captain of the Berkeley club lacrosse team.
Legal career
Persky worked at the law firm Morrison & Foerster, where he did civil litigation for corporations. While he was in private practice, he won the Civil Rights Leadership Award from the California Association of Human Relations Organizations for his work on hate crimes. He also won the Wiley Manuel Pro Bono Award from the State Bar of California for his free work for the poor.
In 1997, Persky started working at the District Attorney’s Office in Santa Clara. In this job, he was in charge of prosecuting crimes like violent sex crimes and hate crimes. He was on the executive committees of the Support Network for Battered Women and the Santa Clara County Network for a Hate-Free Community.
By 2003, Persky was a deputy district attorney in the Santa Clara District Attorney’s Office. He prosecuted juvenile offenders and was a member of the DA’s Juvenile Wards Team.
Judicial career
In 2002, Persky ran for a seat on the Superior Court of California in Santa Clara County but lost to Ron Del Pozzo, who was also a deputy DA. Seat 16 on the court went to Persky with 102,801 votes (47.9%) and 111,679 votes (52.1%). In 2002, the Santa Clara County Bar Association (and its Women Lawyers Committee) and the San Jose Mercury News backed Persky, while Sheriff Laurie Smith, U.S. Representatives Zoe Lofgren and Mike Honda, and the AFL–CIO backed Del Pozzo. Both of the candidates ran a good campaign.
The next year, Persky was put on the court by Governor Gray Davis of California.
He used to be the head of the Community Outreach Committee for the Court.
In June 2016, Persky was chosen for another six-year term on the bench without any opposition.
[24] In 2016, 25 of the judges in Santa Clara County ran without any opposition.
Scales that aren’t even.svg
Some ideas, events, or arguments may be given too much attention in this section. Please help make the presentation more fair. Talk about this problem and find a solution before you delete this message. (Jan. 2017)
In 2016, Brock Allen Turner, a 20-year-old Stanford student who had been convicted of three felony counts of sexual assault, was given a sentence of six months in jail and three years of probation. This got the attention of international media, and Persky was criticized by many people. The maximum sentence allowed by law was fourteen years. Prosecutors asked for a six-year sentence, while the Santa Clara County Probation Department recommended a six-month county jail sentence and the defense asked for a four-month county jail sentence. During sentencing, Persky said that he had thought about the things that the Probation Office had pointed out and the “severe impact” that prison would have on the defendant’s life. After the controversy, the Associated Press looked at 20 cases where Persky had given sentences since January 2015. They found that every time, Persky had gone along with what the probation department had suggested for the sentence.
Some lawyers thought that the sentence in this case was too light. In the Turner case, one juror wrote to Persky to say that Turner’s sentence was “ridiculously light” and made a “mockery” of the whole trial. Danny Cevallos, a criminal defense lawyer in Pennsylvania and a CNN legal analyst, said that even though Turner’s sentence was light, his clean past made him a good candidate for the minimum sentence.
On December 19, 2016, the California Commission on Judicial Performance found no wrongdoing by Persky in the sentence for Turner.
What happened to Persky
Even though no one ran against him in an election five days after he was sentenced, Persky lost his seat in a recall election on June 5, 2018. By June 10, 2016, more than a million people had signed online petitions to get rid of Persky after he got a light sentence in the Turner case. The committee to recall Judge Persky was led by Professor Michele Dauber, a sociologist at Stanford Law School and a longtime advocate for ending sexual assault on college campuses. Dauber is also a family friend of Chanel Miller, who was the victim of sexual assault. The Committee planned to get people in Santa Clara County to sign a petition to force a recall vote in November 2017. Representative Ted Poe (R-Texas) went to the floor of the United States House of Representatives to say that Turner’s sentence was too light and that Persky should be fired. He agreed with the demands.
Jeff Rosen, the prosecutor for Santa Clara County, said “A key part of the U.S. justice system is the independence of the courts. When the courts are independent, they have a lot of power, but they also have to answer to the people they serve.” [35] Danny Cevallos said that judges have some freedom from public pressure, and “based on this sentence alone, there don’t seem to be any grounds for impeachment or allegations of judicial misconduct.” Cevallos said that the movement to recall judges “raises the question of whether removing judges is good for the spirit of the judicial system, especially when the judge’s only mistake is a legal sentence” that was given correctly. The Santa Clara County Bar Association said in a statement that removing Persky would be a “threat to judicial independence” and would put too much weight on just one of his 13 years of decisions. They said they see “no credible assertions that Judge Persky violated the law or his ethical obligations or acted in bad faith” when he handed down the sentence. In the same way, other sitting judges (both state and federal) and legal experts defended Persky’s decision. They pointed out that the sentence might not be fair because a criminal conviction and sex offender registration can affect a person for the rest of their lives, and they asked the bar to protect the independence of the judiciary.
In June 2016, at least ten people who wanted to serve on a jury for a misdemeanor trial for possession of stolen property where Persky was the judge turned down the chance to do so because of the judge’s sentence for Turner. The next week, Rosen filed a mandatory motion for Persky to step down from a case where a male surgical nurse was being charged with sexual battery for allegedly touching the genitalia and breasts of a sedated female patient. Persky was going to be in charge of the criminal trial. Rosen said that his decision to remove the judge from the case was “a rare and well-thought-out step for our office.”
Because of the backlash after he sentenced Turner, Persky asked not to hear any more criminal cases and was moved to the Civil Division of the California Court system.
Main article: 2007 De Anza rape investigation
In 2011, Persky was in charge of a civil case against several members of the De Anza College baseball team. The minor plaintiff, “Jane Doe,” said that the players raped her while she was unconscious until a bystander stopped them. During the trial, Persky decided that the jury should be able to see photos of the plaintiff taken at a party she went to about a year after the alleged gang rape. This was because the defense said that this evidence contradicted the plaintiff’s claims that she had post-traumatic stress disorder. The jury decided that the defendants were not at fault.
After Turner was sentenced in 2016, the lawyers for the De Anza case’s plaintiffs criticized Persky for letting the photos be used as evidence. Attorneys for Doe said that Persky didn’t just let in the photos as unfair evidence. During the discovery phase of the lawsuit, four of the baseball players used the Fifth Amendment to say that they didn’t want to say anything that could be used against them. A lawyer for Doe said that was a crucial moment because it stopped the plaintiff’s legal team from getting information that could have helped them win their case. In 2010, the original judge in the case said that the defendants could refuse to testify, but that if they did, they couldn’t testify in the case again. When Persky took over the trial in 2011, he overturned that decision. Doe’s lawyers say that move hurt their client’s case.
