Stanford University said on Monday that it had done “everything within its power” in a high-profile rape case involving a former student who was convicted of sexually assaulting a woman outside a fraternity party.
The former student, Brock Allen Turner, 20, was charged last year with five felony counts after two graduate students on bicycles found him on top of the woman, who was unconscious. When news of the incident emerged, the case became part of a debate over whether colleges should be forced to notify the police immediately of reports of sexual violence.
In March, Mr. Turner was convicted of three felony charges of sexual assault. And last week Judge Aaron Persky of the Superior Court of Santa Clara County sentenced him to six months in jail and three years’ probation. BuzzFeed published a powerful statement by the victim in the case, who was not a Stanford student but was visiting the campus. She read aloud the statement to Mr. Turner in court at the time he was sentenced.
Almost immediately after news of the sentencing broke, Judge Persky drew intense criticism for handing down what many people called a light sentence. Judge Persky cited Mr. Turner’s lack of a criminal history and his age in delivering the sentence, as well as the judge’s belief that a prison sentence would have a “severe impact” on Mr. Turner.
But many critics asserted that the sentence was in part a product of Mr. Turner’s status as a former varsity swimmer — he withdrew from the university after the incident and was banned from the campus. Mr. Turner has asserted that the encounter was consensual.
Michele Landis Dauber, a professor at Stanford Law School, told The Guardian and other news outlets that she was working on an effort to recall Judge Persky, saying that the sentence was “unjust” and that it sent the wrong message to women.
For its part, Stanford said in a written statement on Monday that it had done “everything within its power to assure that justice was served in this case,” including quickly involving law-enforcement officials for what the university called a “successful prosecution.”
“Once Stanford learned the identity of the young woman involved,” the university said, it “reached out confidentially to offer her support and to tell her the steps we were taking. In less than two weeks after the incident, Stanford had conducted an investigation and banned Turner from setting foot on campus — as a student or otherwise. This is the harshest sanction that a university can impose on a student.”
Stanford said that there had been a “significant amount of misinformation” about its role in the case, but the university reiterated that “its students, its police, and its staff members did everything they could.”
The university added that it “takes the issue of sexual assault extremely seriously and has been a national leader in taking concrete steps” to prevent sexual assault, to train students, and to support victims, among other things.
Stanford is one of 192 colleges and universities that the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights is investigating for potential violations of the gender-equity law known as Title IX in their handling of sexual-violence cases. There are five open investigations at Stanford, more than at any other college in The Chronicle’s Title IX tracker:
