Jail: Brock Turner in Stanford sexual assault case scheduled for early release in 3 months
With good behavior, former Stanford athlete Brock Turner’s controversial six-month jail sentence for sexual assault could be cut in half.
The light sentence created widespread consternation, and now county jail records show Turner is scheduled to be a free man by early September — three months after being booked on June 2.
Turner, a swimmer with Olympic aspirations, was convicted in March of three felony counts: assault with intent to commit rape of an intoxicated person, sexually penetrating an intoxicated person with a foreign object and sexually penetrating an unconscious person with a foreign object.
Under state law, Turner faced six to 14 years in state prison. But national outrage ensued when Santa Clara County Superior Court Judge Aaron Persky sentenced Turner to six months in county jail and three years probation.
The sheriff’s office pointed toward the court when asked about the planned early release.
“We as the sheriff’s office and jail are told when to release inmates and when to accept inmates, basically,” Santa Clara County Sheriff’s spokesman Sgt. James Jensen told Yahoo News on Thursday. “If that’s the release date, that would be from a court telling us when to release him.”
Multiple messages seeking comment from Santa Clara County Superior Court officials weren’t returned.
Early Thursday, Yahoo News reported that the sentence credit given to Turner, 20, was due to a state law aimed at reducing California’s overcrowded state prisons.
While Gov. Jerry Brown’s 2011 massive prison reform initiative does stipulate half-time credit for felony defendants sentenced to county jails, a California corrections official and others said similar sentence reductions have been on the books for decades.
“People are routinely released from jail and prisons months and years before their sentence date,” said Jeffrey Callison, a spokesman with the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. “Whatever happens, people always yell it’s early release. It’s just the way it is. It gives offenders an incentive to behave themselves and hopefully rehabilitate themselves.”
Turner’s victim, an unidentified 23-year-old woman who was not a student of the university in Palo Alto, Calif., was attending a fraternity party when the assault occurred in January 2015.
The case captured national attention after a poignant 12-page statement read aloud in court by the victim was published online and shared by millions. Resentment over the light sentence grew further when comments Turner’s father made in court about his son paying a “steep price” for “20 minutes of action” also went viral.
At the sentencing, the judge — identified by the Guardian as a former captain of the Stanford lacrosse team — said Turner’s “lack of complete acquiescence to the verdict should count against him.”
“A prison sentence would have a severe impact on him,” Persky reportedly told the courtroom. “I think he will not be a danger to others.”
Stanford students to protest sexual assault sentencing at graduation >>>
An online petition seeking to have Persky face impeachment hearings was nearing one million signatures by late Thursday.
“Judge Persky failed to see that the fact that Brock Turner is a white male star athlete at a prestigious university does not entitle him to leniency,” wrote a Miami woman who started the petition. “He also failed to send the message that sexual assault is against the law regardless of social class, race, gender or other factors.”
The Santa Clara jail, currently home to 3,600 inmates, placed Turner in protective custody because of the nature of his crime, Jensen said.
“There’s also LGBT members in protective custody, gang dropouts and anybody we determine the need based upon their mental capacity,” Jensen said. “By no means is he by himself.”
(This story has been updated since it was originally published.)
Jason Sickles is a national reporter for Yahoo News. Follow him on Twitter (@jasonsickles).
