Last week, former Stanford swimmer Brock Turner was sentenced to six months in jail for the sexual assault of an unconscious woman in 2015.
Prosecutors had asked for a sentence of six years in prison, and the maximum for Turner's crimes is 14 years.
But Turner's father doesn't think his son should go to jail at all.
In a letter obtained from the public court file and posted to Twitter by Stanford law professor Michele Dauber, Dan A. Turner pleads Judge Aaron Persky for leniency, calling jail time a "steep price to pay for 20 minutes of action out of his 20 plus years of life."
He even suggests that his son's actions on the night of the sexual assault were not violent. "What I know as his father is that incarceration is not the appropriate punishment for Brock," he wrote in the letter's conclusion.
#brockturner father: son not "violent" only got "20 mins of action" shouldn't have to go to prison. @thehuntingroundpic.twitter.com/IFECJs687b
— Michele Dauber (@mldauber) June 5, 2016Persky's sentence, however, has been widely criticized for its leniency.
"I am disappointed with the sentence in this case," Santa Clara County District Attorney Jeff Rosen said in a statement. "This predatory offender has failed to take responsibility, failed to show remorse, and failed to tell the truth."
In one of the letter's most puzzling passages, the elder Turner writes that his son has been "deeply altered forever" by these events. Absent from letter was an acknowledgment of the effects his son's actions have had on his 23-year-old victim. The powerful statement she made in court shows that — to say the very least — her life has been deeply altered, too.
"You took away my worth, my privacy, my energy, my time, my safety, my intimacy, my confidence, my own voice, until today," she said. " I am not just a drunk victim ... I am a human being who has been irreversibly hurt."
Read Dan A. Turner's entire letter right here.
Editor's note — This article has been updated with the following correction: Brock Turner was convicted of multiple charges of sexual assault, not rape. He was convicted of three felonies, including assault with intent to rape.
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