A former Stanford University student and star swimmer was sentenced to just six months in jail for his sexual assault of an unconscious woman at a frat party last year, drawing protests from the public for the apparent leniency of the judge.
Brock Turner was sentenced by Santa Clara County Superior Judge Aaron Persky, who is now facing an online impeachment petition for his decision.
Turner, a former university swimmer, was convicted of three felony counts of sexual assault. These are assault with intent to commit rape of an intoxicated or unconscious person, penetrating an intoxicated person with a foreign object and penetrating an unconscious person with a foreign object, TIME reports.
As an offshoot of his conviction, Turner has reportedly been banned for life from competing in events sanctioned by USA Swimming, including the upcoming U.S. Olympic Trials.
Before the sentencing, his dad, Dan Turner, wrote a letter to Persky to say that the case has severely affected his son.
"That is a steep price to pay for 20 minutes of action out of his 20 plus years of life," he said.
In an impact statement, the victim said, "The consequences of sexual assault needs to be severe enough that people feel enough fear to exercise good judgment even if they are drunk, severe enough to be preventative. The fact that Brock was a star athlete at a prestigious university should not be seen as an entitlement to leniency, but as an opportunity to send a strong cultural message that sexual assault is against the law regardless of social class."
She told Turner that "you took away my worth, my privacy, my energy, my time, my intimacy, my confidence, my own voice, until today. The damage is done, no one can undo it."
In addition to the jail sentence, Turner was sentenced to three years of probation and ordered to register as a sex offender for life.
An online petition on Petition.org seeking to remove Persky from his position for his lenient sentence has been signed by more than 485,000 people as of Friday.
"Despite a unanimous guilty verdict, three felony convictions, the objections of 250 Stanford students, Jeff Rosen the district attorney for Santa Clara, as well as the deputy district attorney who likened Turner to 'a predator searching for prey' Judge Persky allowed the lenient sentence suggested by the probation department," the petition read.
The petition said Turner has not shown any remorse for what he did and is even planning appeals to overturn his conviction.
