Aaron Persky, the Santa Clara County Superior Court judge who was vilified by some for his sentencing of former Stanford University swimmer Brock Turner, defended his decision in an interview with CBS News on Tuesday.
Persky made some of the first comments about the controversial 2016 trial a week before voters go to polls on a recall after he sentenced Turner to six months in jail on three counts of felony sexual assault, outraging some for being too lenient, noted CBS News.
The recall vote is June 5. Brock was accused of assaulting an unconscious woman on the Stanford campus in 2015, KTVU noted.
Turner registered as a sex offender in 2016 in Greene County, Ohio, where he is originally from, after serving three months of the six-month sentence from Persky.
"If a judge is thinking in the back of his or her mind how is this going to look? How will it look on social media? Will I be vilified on cable news? That's the wrong avenue," Persky told CBS News. "We can't do that. We shouldn't do that."
"And by my ethical constraints by the rule of law, I had to completely tune that out," Persky added.
CBS News wrote that Turner's sentence followed the recommendation of the Santa Clara County probation department. Meanwhile, the California Commission on Judicial Performance ruled in favor of Persky, concluding that there was "not clear and convincing evidence of bias ... or … judicial misconduct" in the sentencing.
In a statement made to journalists at his home earlier this month, Persky said judges will find it more difficult to hand down impartial rulings if the recall to remove him is successful, according to KTVU.
"Do not let public opinion influence your decision," Persky said during that gathering, per KTVU. "It corrupts the rule of law. This recall, if successful, will make it harder for judges to keep this promise."
Persky told CBS News that while ethics guidelines prevent him from speaking specifically about how and why he arrived at his decision involving Turner, he said even now with the popularity of the #MeToo social media movement, his decision would have been the same.
"I accept responsibility for every decision that I've made as a judge," Persky told CBS News. "But what I cannot accept are the downstream consequences, the collateral damage, if you will, to the next case, to the next judge's decision, to even the next juror's decision.
"I mean this notion, the power of social media, the power of politics, if it affects jurors then where are we? We've completely corrupted our system," he added.
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