Brock Turner Case: A Million Signatures Turned in as State Lawmakers Join Push to Remove Judge
As lawmakers and celebrity consultants rushed to support their effort, activists handed a judicial commission a million signatures Friday calling for the ouster of a Santa Clara County judge who sentenced former Stanford athlete Brock Turner to just six months in jail for sexually assaulting an unconscious woman.
“This really speaks out to a groundswell of outrage in the community,” said Paul Hogarth, campaign director for Daily Kos. “We do a lot of online petitions on myriad political progressive causes, and have never come close to getting one million signatures on anything.”
The delivery of the signatures was only the highest profile development on a day when furor continued to grow over what has quickly become an internationally symbolic cause in the fight against “rape culture.” But there was also support for Judge Aaron Persky: The county bar association put out a statement decrying efforts to oust the judge as an assault on judicial independence. And court officials, besieged with demands for documents in the case, took the unusual step of emailing copies of the entire 471-page file to news organizations — at 2 a.m.