Rapist, a privileged Stanford athlete, sentenced to only six months in jail after a judge expressed concern for his future

Stanford Woman Shares The Powerful Letter She Read To The Man Who Assaulted Her

Lilli Petersen
Refinery 29
June 4, 2016

After her rapist was sentenced to only six months in jail for her horrifying assault, his accuser is speaking out.

The woman, who has not been publicly identified, shared a full copy of the letter she read at the sexual assault trial of Brock Turner with BuzzFeed News. In March, Turner was convicted of three counts of felony sexual assault. A former Stanford University student and prospective 2016 Olympic swimmer, Turner faced 14 years in jail on the convictions, according to The Guardian. However, Judge Aaron Persky decided to sentence him to six months plus probation, saying that “a prison sentence would have a severe impact on him.”

“Lighthouses don’t go running all over
an island looking for boats to save;
they just stand there shining. Although
I can’t save every boat, I hope that by
speaking today, you absorbed a small
amount of light, a small knowing that
you can’t be silenced, a small
satisfaction that justice was served, a
small assurance that we are getting
somewhere, and a big, big knowing
that you are important,
unquestionably, you are untouchable,
you are beautiful, you are to be
valued, respected, undeniably, every
minute of every day, you are powerful
and nobody can take that away from
you.” 

More links:

http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2016/06/05/3784913/stanford-sexual-assault-dad-letter/ 

http://www.mercurynews.com/san-mateo-county/ci_29975888/brock-turner-sexual-assault-case-victim-reads-letter

Here is a judge and a case that offers a bit of hope for our legal system

Judge Awards Utah Couple $306,750 in Case Against Retailer That Tried to Impose Fine for Critical Online Review

Statement of Scott Michelman, Attorney, Public Citizen

June 26, 2014

Contact: Angela Bradbery (202) 588-7741
Scott Michelman (617) 899-9076

On Wednesday, Judge Dee Benson of U.S. District Court in Utah awarded Public Citizen clients John and Jen Palmer $306,750 ($102,250 in compensatory damages and $204,500 in punitive damages) against the online retailer KlearGear.com. The company had demanded $3,500 from the Palmers for writing a critical online review of the company, then ruined John’s credit when he refused to pay.

As a result of KlearGear.com’s actions, the Palmers lost credit opportunities; suffered anxiety, fear and humiliation; and spent weeks without heat in their home for themselves and their 3-year-old son when their furnace broke and they were unable to obtain a loan to replace it.

Public Citizen sued KlearGear.com on the Palmers’ behalf in December. When KlearGear.com failed to respond, the court granted a default judgment declaring that John did not owe the $3,500 and setting a hearing, held Wednesday, to determine damages. After an hour-long hearing at which both plaintiffs testified, the judge announced the award from the bench.

We are gratified by Judge Benson’s ruling, which appropriately compensates the Palmers for their ordeal and punishes KlearGear.com for its abuse of the credit reporting system in retaliation for the Palmers’ speech. The court sent a strong message that corporate bullying of consumers would not be tolerated. The Palmers are relieved that John’s credit has been restored and they feel vindicated by today’s award.

More information about the case is available here.

The new debtors prisons: Pennsylvania mother dies while jailed for truancy fines

Laura Clawson

Daily Kos staff

Jun 12, 2014

The new debtors prisons: Pennsylvania mother dies while jailed for truancy fines

If you thought debtors prison was something straight out of Charles Dickens—and something long ago left behind us—think again. Debtors prison is becoming very much a part of the American prison-industrial complex, and on Saturday, a Pennsylvania mother of seven died there:

Eileen DiNino, 55, of Reading, was found dead in a jail cell Saturday, halfway through a 48-hour sentence that would have erased about $2,000 in fines and court costs. The debt had accrued since 1999, and involved several of her seven children, most recently her boys at a vocational high school. "Did something happen? Was she scared to death?" said District Judge Dean R. Patton, who reluctantly sent DiNino to the Berks County jail Friday after she failed to pay the debt for four years.

While dying in jail over truancy fees may be rare, going to jail over truancy fees is all too common, and it disproportionately hits women: "More than 1,600 people have been jailed in Berks County alone—two-thirds of them women—over truancy fines since 2000, the Reading Eagle reported Wednesday." Of course it goes without saying that people who go to jail over $2,000 in fines accumulated over years are not wealthy. Increasing court fees get added to fines—DiNino owed money for things like postage and a "judicial computer project"—often creating a cycle of debt owed to the state that it's almost impossible for low-income people to escape, no matter how hard they work to avoid incurring further debt. Somehow the answer our criminal system has arrived at is to spend money jailing people because they owe the system money they cannot afford to pay. And that's why Eileen DiNino died in jail.

Billionaire Gets Four Months for Sexual Assault of a 12-Year-Old Girl

Ironically, this case seems to indicate that girls in wealthy families receive less protection from the justice system than girls in poor families because rich stepfathers must be protected from jail time.

Are you hearing this, women of wealth?  Are your daughters fair game for sexual predators with money? 

It looks like the victim in this case may have been paid not to testify.  Maybe it's time to put some protection for stepdaughters in prenups. 

Mr. Johnson's company owns Windex, Pledge, and Ziplock. 
SC Johnson and Son says it's "goal is to make homes better 
for families."

Billionaire Gets Four Months for Sexual Assault of a 12-Year-Old Girl

by Richard Riis 

Richard Riis

Daily Kos

Jun 08, 2014

 

“Affluenza” has struck again.
Samuel Curtis “S. C.” Johnson III, the 59-year-old billionaire heir to the S. C. Johnson & Sons (formerly Johnson’s Wax) fortune, who confessed to repeatedly sexually assaulting his teenage stepdaughter, has received an prison sentence of only four months from Racine County Circuit Justice Eugene Gasiorkiewicz, citing the Johnson family’s importance in the community.
Johnson pled guilty to mere misdemeanor charges of fourth-degree sexual assault and disorderly conduct instead of felony sexual assault on a minor child. The victim told police Johnson was “a sex addict” and touched her inappropriately 15 to 20 times beginning when she was 12 years old. The stepdaughter has since moved to North Carolina and was unwilling to return to Wisconsin to testify in the case.
Johnson’s attorney, Michael F. Hart, that the maximum prison term for his client was not fair and should be reserved for “maximum defendants,” people unlike his client (read: not billionaires), who has no prior record and who leads a “productive life.”

 [Maura Larkins' comment:  a "productive life"?  Really?  What does Mr. Johnson produce?  Doesn't the lawyer really mean that Mr. Johnson enjoys his life more than other men who rape their step-daughters?  

Isn't he saying that people who are fortunate should be punished less than the average guy?  

Ironically, this case also seems to say that girls in wealthy families deserve less protection than girls in poor families.  Are you hearing this, women of wealth?]

Judge Gasiorkiewicz agreed and gave Johnson a fine of $6,000 and four months in prison. The judge ruled that he must serve at least 60 days of the sentence before he will be eligible for release.
This decision comes fast on the heels of several other high-profile cases in which justice has been perverted in favor of the very wealthy.
It was the case of Ethan Couch that gave us the “affluenza” defense. Couch, the son of a wealthy Texas businessman, fled the scene after he killed four people in a drunk driving accident and received only ten years’ probation from Judge Jean Boyd, thanks to his attorney’s argument that the teen suffered from “affluenza” and failed to grasp the consequences of his actions. Couch is now attending a very expensive, very prestigious rehab center, paid for not by his multi-millionaire parents but by the taxpayers of Texas.
Last month, a Washington state judge failed to sentence wealthy businessman Joshua Shaun Goodman, arrested for his seventh DUI and for leading police on a 100 mph chase through Olympia, that ended when he crashed into a home, to any jail time. The reason? According to Judge James Dixon, giving Goodman jail time “wouldn’t be fair for him.” The judge even gave Goodman permission to travel to New York and attend the Super Bowl while his case was being adjudicated.
Du Pont heir Robert H. Richards IV, had his sentence of eight years in prison for raping his daughter repeatedly between the ages of 3 and 5 as well as molesting his son starting at the age of 19 months, suspended by Delaware Superior Court Judge Jan Jurden. Why? Jurden thought the rapist “would not fare well” in prison. In 2009 Richards was placed on eight years' probation and ordered to attend an inpatient psychiatric program at MacLean Hospital in Massachusetts. As of April 2014 court records show that Richards has yet to appear for treatment.
While it is still a sad fact that justice in America is unequal for black and white, the color the system increasingly panders to most outrageously is green.

Originally posted to Richard Riis on Sun Jun 08, 2014 at 05:23 AM PDT.

Also republished by Badger State Progressive and This Week in the War on Women.

Is the public served when attorneys and litigants do favors for judges? Let's take the politics out of choosing judges

See blog post: Chief Justice John Roberts: Judge Brent Benjamin doesn't have to recuse himself just because of a measly $3 million campaign contribution

Electing judges is a bad idea, but appointing judges is almost as bad. Why not create a pool of highly-rated attorneys, created by the Bar Association (we don't want to eliminate politics completely, right?), and then use a lottery to choose judges from that pool as positions become available?

Seriously, why not? The only reason not to do this is to keep politics in the courtroom.

But for now, we're stuck with judicial elections in San Diego. Let's choose the best candidates. Federal prosecutor Carla Keehn is running against Judge Lisa Schall in June 2014.


MATT TAIBBI'S NEW BOOK ABOUT OUR TWO-TIERED JUSTICE SYSTEM



The Divide
American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap
Matt Taibbi and Molly Crabapple
PBS
April 6, 2014

...On how he discovered 'the divide'

I was covering these gigantic Wall Street white-collar-criminal scandals, and I became interested in the concept of why nobody was going to jail, why we didn't have criminal prosecutions. And then it occurred to me that it's impossible to really talk about the gravity of that problem unless you know who is going to jail in the United States, and how those people go to jail and how that works.

What I ended up finding is that it's incredibly easy for people who don't have money to go to jail for just about anything. There's almost an inverse relationship between the ease with which you can put a poor person in jail for, say, welfare fraud, and the difficulty that prosecutors face when they try to put someone from a too-big-to-fail bank in jail for a more serious kind of fraud.

On media coverage of white-collar crime

Over time I think a kind of Stockholm Syndrome develops, it's kind of the same thing that happens with campaign reporters and candidates: You start to sort of sympathize with the people you cover in this weird subterranean, psychological way.

'A Very Sordid Story'

Matt Taibbi On The Fairfax Financial Case

In this audio clip, NPR's Kelly McEvers asks Matt Taibbi about the most salacious case in his book, The Divide. Taibbi tells and the short-sellers who Fairfax alleges took revenge when a deal didn't go through as expected. The company sued in 2006.

Taibbi says it's a great example of the judicial divide between the rich and poor. It's easy to think hedge fund managers can't be criminals, he says, because they're often seen as polite and refined.

"[But] in many cases, they're really not," Taibbi says. "I mean, in this case, they're just as streety and gross as any other kind of criminal."

I think what ends up happening is these stories get written about, but they get written without outrage, or without the right tone, and they are also not written for the right audiences. They're written for Wall Street audiences who want to find out how this lawsuit turned out. They may not want to see those people thrown in jail, they just might be interested in seeing how far the government is willing to go this week in putting white-collar offenders in jail.

On comparing banks and people

The HSBC case was . This is a bank that admitted to washing over $850 million for a pair of Central and South American drug cartels. They admit to this behavior, they pay a fine, no individual has to do a day in jail. All I really wanted to say was, here are our actors at the very top of our illegal narcotics business who are getting a walk from the government, a complete and total walk ...

I went to court that day, I asked around and said, "What's the dumbest drug case you saw today?" I found an attorney who was willing to put me in touch with a number of people who had been busted and thrown in jail for having a joint in their pocket...


Retired Judge Linda Quinn is working with school attorney Dan Shinoff
of Stutz Artiano Shinoff & Holtz on a fundraiser for Judge Lisa Schall.

See all posts re Judge Lisa Schall.

See all posts re Judge Gary Kreep.

From The Onion: Judge Rules White Girl Will Be Tried As Black Adult

This story is hilarious and heartbreaking at the same time.

Judge Rules White Girl Will Be Tried As Black Adult (VIDEO)
The Onion
The court ruled a white teen who stabbed a classmate to death will face the jury as a 300-pound black man.

See video here: Judge Rules White Girl Will Be Tried As Black Adult