You may be aware of the case of Brock Turner, the Stanford athlete swimmer headed for the Olympic Games who was arrested for raping a young woman on campus. He was given a brief term of three months by the judge, a sentence which caused extreme outrage. The judge said he didn’t want to ruin this young man’s life.
But there is a lot more to this case than meets the eye. First of all this is no ordinary rape case. It’s a date rape case and even beyond that, it’s fraught will all sorts of problems.
Now I am not arguing that Turner did not commit the crime of rape (actually sexual assault) according to the letter of the law. According to a close reading of the law, he indeed committed the crime of sexual assault. And I have no problem with his arrest or even his sentence, which I regard as appropriate.
But even rape cases, as in any other cases, need to be examined individually according to the spirit and not the letter of the law. Females are incapable of enforcing laws according to the spirit of the law and not the letter because of their extreme emotional and irrational brains, which are not their fault by the way.
But I don’t see why we should put a bunch of humans with extreme emotional and irrational brains in charge of making and enforcing our laws, sorry. Anyone with a lick of sense can tell you that that’s a bad idea.
The sordid saga unfolds thus:
The young woman in question, in her early 20’s, was not a student but instead lived nearby and sometimes went to campus parties and hung out with some of the university students.
She hears about the party via her younger sister. I believe that her younger sister goes with her to the party. They leave around 10 PM and showed up at the party soon after. This is a pretty wild bash, and this young lady proceeds to get positively smashed falling down drunk on alcohol via her own free choice, and in my opinion, bad decisions.
At some point around 11:30 AM, she gets together with Turner at the party. They more or less pick up on each other as is often the case in human mating. A wild 90 minute kissing, etc. makeout session follows all through the party for quite some time and then outside the party, which they leave around 12:30. The couple are seen outside the party around this time and the young woman is described as “all over Brock” just about consensually raping him.
Somehow or other they end up behind a large trash container on campus around 1 AM. They are still making out and apparently Brock is finger-banging her.
Already this is not rape because in California, a man must use his penis to commit rape. You can’t rape a woman with your finger. Apparently you can commit some other crime with your finger called sexual assault or something along those lines. So he never raped her. He sexually assaulted her. Not a big difference but still.
All of this was fine and dandy and consensual, and the charge against Turner was not some BS rape charge for having sex with a drunken woman. He was blasted himself so logically she was raping him too, right? She couldn’t consent so he was raping her, but he couldn’t consent either, so she was raping him. She how these Female Rule laws end up making no sense?
Anyway, at some point in this rutting on the ground behind trashcans like pigs in shit behavior, this poor young woman passes out due to extreme drunkenness. Apparently Turner realizes that she’s unconscious, but he keeps banging her anyway because…I have no idea? He has necrophilic tendencies? He’s a normally horny and totally wasted young male with few self-controls?
At any rate, he finger bangs her for 1 1/2 minutes before some students find the couple behind the trash cans and figure out that he’s sexually assaulting an unconscious woman. I believe the students originally think that the woman might be dead and Turner might have killed her.
There were some males in the group, and they pull Turner off, manhandle him into some sort of griplock imprisonment, and march him off to meet the nearest police officer. Turner cooperates. The officer returns to the scene and sees the passed out half naked young woman. The witnesses say they saw him fingering her while she was passed out cold. Turner is placed under arrest.
Well there you have it, folks. Not exactly the way it was made out to be, right? I agree that he sexually assaulted her, but given the nature of the case, I have no problem with a few months in jail, which is Hell anyway if you want to know for anyone who’s never been there. Especially for a nice upper middle class White boy like him.
The young woman is very shaken up by all this. She wakes up the next morning in her house. Her clothes and body are dirty – she has dirt all over her. There are dead leaves stuck all over her clothing. She looks in the mirror, hungover the next day, and she’s a wasted, ravaged mess of a young lady. She more or less PTSD’s out as a result of this trauma.
I read her extremely angry and disgusted eight page account, and I actually felt very sorry for this young lass. Clearly she was very much harmed by this event.
Nevertheless, crimes must be judged on what exactly the perpetrator did, not on how the victim reacted to it because victims, especially female victims, tend to overreact. I mean I grab some woman’s ass, and she has a heart attack.
So I need to get 20 years? Maybe I need a few weeks in jail to think about it, or maybe I don’t even deserve cuffs at all, but what’s important here is what I did, which was not much. Her overreaction is frankly her problem, and I had no role in how her body chose to react.
So even reading this poor woman’s very moving account, I am still happy with a three month sentence for Turner. Keep in mind he now has a felony on his record for life. And don’t forget that he will be registering on sex offender lists until his dying day. For a clean-cut young college boy of his ilk, those are a couple of crushing blows and certainly serve as major punishment.
Ok, now you all see why the Brock Turner case was complicated?
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