Brock Allen Turner. This name resonates with the majority of people currently as we remember the injustice this man was served. In January 2015, Turner brutally raped a fellow Stanford University student, the trauma to her so severe she had to learn the details of the assault after waking up in the hospital. At the beginning of the trial the following month, he plead not guilty for five felony charges, including attempted rape, rape of an intoxicated person, and rape of an unconscious person. Although two of the five charges were dropped after the preliminary hearing, Brock Turner was found guilty of the remaining three.
The jury disagreed with Turner's testimony, saying that his victim had given consent, and instead voted in favor of the woman he assaulted after hearing the powerful letter she had read to her attacker during the trial. As she read this letter, most of it directly to her assailant, she said "your damage was concrete; stripped of titles, degrees, enrollment. My damage was internal, unseen, I carry it with me. You took away my worth, my privacy, my energy, my time, my safety, my intimacy, my confidence, my own voice, until today."
It was an enormous victory for everyone once the jury declared that Brock Turner was declared guilty of rape, since so many rape cases don't make it to trial, and so many victims are too scared to report their assault. After hearing the decision, the defense agreed that they would aim to try and get Brock to serve only six years behind bars, but the judge declared that he would only serve six months in county jail with three years of probation.
The reason for this unusually short sentence wasn't because of the letter written by Brock Turner's father, referring to any jail time whatsoever as "a steep punishment for twenty minutes of action," but it was because of his own opinions of Brock. Despite the jury's ruling, the judge on the case, Aaron Persky, believed Brock's testimony over the woman he assaulted and said that serving time would be lead to "adverse collateral consequences" and "severely impact" Turner.
This trial has gained national attention and Brock Turner has entered the spotlight once again as he was released from jail and signed on to the sex offender registry. The misjustice served to someone who committed a crime as horrible as rape has outraged a large portion of the nation. But the most infuriating thing is that history has repeated itself once again.
John Enochs, a former student and fraternity member at Indiana University, brutally raped two women, one in 2013 and another at a party in 2015. Enochs claimed to be innocent and ended up negotiating a plea bargain with the prosecution. The defendant agreed to plead guilty to the charge of battery with moderate bodily injury, if the two felony rape charges were dropped. Enochs, if the rape charges were not dismissed, could have served up to 16 years in prison, but ended up getting off with one year of probation and spending a total of one day in jail.
Enochs was offered the plea deal in the first place because the two crimes were separate and would have been tried by different juries and because the witness statements were weak since many of them were drinking during the time of the crime, but that isn't even the biggest issue with this case. The judge on his trial decided to offer him such a short sentence because of his ages. Numerous other critical mistakes were made during the duration of the trial, such as the fact that the defense never once spoke to the victim of Enochs' second rape.
The cases of Brock Turner and John Enochs are just a few examples of rapists not receiving proper punishment because of their race and age. Rape is rape, and whether a 20 year old or a 40 year old commits the crime, everyone should receive punishment for this disgusting act.
