Brock Turner and the Wisdom of Revulsion

As final exams ended at Stanford University, a consensus seemed to form among students: Brock Turner’s six-month sentence for sexually assaulting an unconscious woman behind a dumpster was disgusting. Most people thought, and rightly so, that it was a miscarriage of justice for him to get off so easily. With good behavior, Turner will be out of jail in just three months — a summer vacation. For one of the most serious crimes the mind can conjure, three months is inadequate. It isn’t just.

I had met Brock Turner at a party at Stanford, where I am also a student. After his sentence made national news, he was all anyone wanted to talk about. I listened and heard students’ shock subside and fade into cynicism. The lenient sentence played into everyone’s favorite narrative. “Did you really expect the justice system to punish a rich, white male?” was the most common refrain. “There is a culture of not taking rape seriously in America,” others explained.

But nobody wanted to talk about another narrative, one often very popular with the same students and faculty condemning Turner’s sentence: how America needs to stop locking up its criminals for so long.

The Left almost uniformly sees over-sentencing and over-incarceration as a grave injustice, ruining lives for no reason. “Retribution is archaic,” we are often told. “Instead we should focus on rehabilitating criminals into productive members of society.”

Who among us really believes that five years in a tough prison would do wonders for Turner’s psychological health? Or that spending more time in prison would make him less aggressive? Judge Aaron Persky probably asked exactly these questions and came to the conclusion that a long jail sentence would not help the rehabilitation process.

That sounds perfectly reasonable — until you are faced with Brock Turner. The judge followed all the proper liberal pieties. And he is hated for it.

Unlike Persky, Americans have not asked, “What is best for Brock Turner?” Instead, they ask, “What is just?” They expect the courts to deliver a reasonable answer. A reduced sentence might be best for Turner, but at the end of the day, that is not the question — or at least not the only question. When Turner decided to sexually assault a helpless woman behind a dumpster, he forfeited the right to get the best outcome for himself. His welfare is no longer our primary concern.

Turner’s sentence was unjust because three months is a pittance, far too little for the gravity of the offense he has committed. Real retribution is necessary not just for the victim and her family to achieve some peace of mind, but for basic justice to be achieved. The Left has long tried to advance an abstract argument that retribution is unnecessary or even immoral, but in this case the inhumanity of that position has been laid bare.

The idea that the punishment for sexual assault should be only a summer in county jail has made national headlines because it instinctively elicits revulsion from people across the country, right and left, rich and poor. We should heed that revulsion — there is wisdom in it.

However, our revulsion should lead to an appeal of the paltry sentence, not to counterproductive actions such as intimidating judges. Stanford professor and anti–sexual assault activist Michele Dauber has led just such an effort, and over 800,000 signatures have been obtained, in less than a week, for a petition to “remove Judge Aaron Persky from the bench for [his] decision in [the] Brock Turner rape case.” The judge has also received death threats. The message is clear: Do what the mob wants or it will come for you.

But how can our judges remain independent if they know that even one decision that flies in the face of popular opinion could get them recalled and replaced? They cannot. As Kate Berry of the left-leaning Brennan Center has concluded, “The research is clear: Judges are more likely to hand out harsh sentences, including death, the closer they get to a re-election or retention election campaign.” Recall petitions ensure that every sentence becomes harsher. It is an article of faith on the left that America has a major over-incarceration problem, but when the Left thinks that a judge has been too lenient, it throws its notions of judicial independence and criminal justice reform out the window.

Our revulsion at Brock Turner’s pitifully short sentence is good. It makes clear that Americans still demand a type of justice that includes retribution. It makes clear that real-life cases need to be treated as more than abstractions. But when the wisdom of revulsion creates a mob, it has ceased to be wisdom at all.