Stanford offender got a life sentence

The victim fought back with words of rage. “I thought there’s no way this is going to trial; there were witnesses, there was dirt in my body, he ran but was caught,” she wrote in a 12-page statement at the sentencing of Brock Turner, the former Stanford student convicted of sexually assaulting her. “He’s going to settle, formally apologize, and we will both move on. Instead, I was told he hired a powerful attorney, expert witnesses, private investigators who were going to try and find details about my personal life to use against me.”

The case went to trial and a jury found Turner, a former swimmingscholarship student, guilty of three counts of sexual assault. He had told authorities the woman consented to being digitally penetrated near a trash bin, even though she had consumed too much alcohol to be capable of giving consent.

Turner ran away when two Swedish graduate students intervened — which shows consciousness of guilt. His quickness to blame alcohol for his actions — and to misrepresent himself as new to the party culture — sealed his reputation as an entitled white kid who refused to own his crimes.

Prosecutors sought a six-year sentence. Judge Aaron Persky instead issued terms closer to a probation officer’s recommendation. In light of Turner’s lack of prior criminal convictions and low to moderate risk of re-offending, a probation report recommended a sentence of a year or less in jail, followed by three years probation. Six months in jail — three months, really — followed by three years of probation is too short a sentence for what Turner did to a 22-yearold woman who could not fight back. Outrage ensued.

“Emily Doe’s” statement laid bare Turner’s predatory behavior and vile excuses. She’s right. In a better world, Turner, 20, would have owned his behavior, thrown himself at the mercy of the court and spared his victim from being violated during an ugly trial. Instead he fought and won a light sentence.

But did he get off lightly?

His jail time is too short, but his harshest punishment is a lifetime on the sex offender registry. Every year for the rest of his life, he’ll have to go to a police department and register. His earning power is diminished because he won’t be able to get most professional licenses. He’ll be on the same database as pedophiles.

Defense attorney Paula Canny thinks some judges reduce incarceration time because they know the registry is for life. California’s registry has so many names — close to 100,000 — that the Sex Offender Management Board has asked Sacramento to limit lifetime registration to kidnappers and violent sexual predators, and allow less serious offenders to be removed after 10 or 20 years.

“It puts you in a situation that you really have no choice but to go to trial,” San Francisco Public Defender Jeff Adachi told me.

If Sacramento allowed plea deals that would mean shorter time on the registry for first-time offenders, more guys like Turner might plead guilty — and spare their victims from having to testify in court. A smarter registry could set up the scenario Emily Doe suggested.

I wonder if Turner’s attorney would have cut a deal if not for the lifetime sex registry. Santa Clara County Chief Assistant District Attorney Jay Boyarsky says no. This case never was going to settle, he said; his office would not have agreed to a guilty plea for a lesser charge that would detour the registry. Besides, he added, defense attorneys tend to fight deals that land their clients behind bars.

I asked Boyarsky if he thinks Turner should be on a registry for life. “I do,” Boyarsky answered, not to shame the offender, but to protect the public. But I have to ask, did the sex offender registry protect Emily Doe?

Too many social problems are conceived of in terms of what “we” can do for “them.” After decades of massive expansions of the welfare state, the answer seems to range from “not very much” to “making matters worse.”

Undaunted, people in a number of countries are coming up with new proposals that are variations on the theme of governmentprovided income — which amounts to relieving people from personal responsibility. Yet even some conservatives and libertarians are coming up with proposals for more “efficient” versions of the welfare state — namely direct cash grants for life to virtually all adults, instead of the current hodgepodge of overlapping bureaucratic programs.

Charles Murray recognizes that “some people will idle away their lives” under his proposal. “But that is already a problem,” he says, and therefore is no valid objection to replacing the current welfare state with a less costly alternative.

Everyone recognizes that there are some people unable to provide for their own survival — infants and the severely disabled, among others. But providing for such people is wholly different from a blanket guarantee for everybody that they need not lift a finger to feed, clothe or shelter themselves.

The financial cost of providing such a guarantee, though huge, is not the worst of the problems. The history of what has actually happened in times and places where people were relieved from the challenge of survival by windfall gains is not encouraging.

In both England and the United States, the expansion of the welfare state since the 1960s has been accompanied by a vast expansion in the amount of crime, violence, drug addiction, fatherless children and other signs of social degeneration.

In 16th and 17th century Spain — its “golden age” — gold and silver looted by the ton from Spanish colonies in the Western Hemisphere enabled Spain to survive without its people having to develop the skills, the sciences or the work ethic of other countries in Western Europe.

What this meant in practical terms was that other countries developed the skills, the knowledge, the self-discipline and other forms of human capital that Spain did not have to develop, since it could receive the tangible products of this human capital from other countries.

But once the windfall gains from its colonies were gone, Spain became one of the poorest countries in Western Europe.

In Saudi Arabia today, the great windfall gain is its vast petroleum reserve. This has spawned both a fabulously wealthy ruling elite and a heavily subsidized general population in which many have become disdainful of work. The net result has been a work force in which foreigners literally outnumber Saudis.

Some welfare states’ windfall gains have enabled a large segment of their own citizens to live in subsidized idleness while many jobs stigmatized as “menial” are taken over by foreigners. Often these initially poor foreigners rise up the economic scale, while the subsidized domestic poor fail to rise. Do we really want more of that? British historian Arnold Toynbee proposed the “challenge and response” thesis that human beings advance when there are challenges they must meet. The welfare state removes challenges — and has produced many social retrogressions.

Those with the welfare state vision often want to remove challenges even from games by getting rid of winning and losing. That is consistent with their overall assumptions about life. But it seems very inconsistent for conservatives and libertarians to support plans whose net effect would be to reduce the inherent challenges of life for still more people.