The cover photo for this article should have been the one associated with Brock Turner's case from the very beginning, but it wasn't released until recently by Santa Clara County's Sheriff Department. This is Turner's mugshot from the night he raped an unconscious woman behind a dumpster after a party on January 2015.
But the public is more familiar with a picture he took for his former university, Stanford:
(Stanford University.)
His unreadable stare is what should have been plastered all over the news after two Swedish graduate students tackled him to the ground and called the police, but instead this image was the most widely accessible before this week.
Looking at his sports jacket, striped cardinal red tie, and his wide smile you would probably think to yourself, "This doesn't look like a rapist." However, I beg you not to be fooled by the meticulous care and consideration media sell-outs have taken to ensure his reputation as a university swim star en-route to the Olympics wasn't completely tarnished. As if it isn't enough that the media framed him as a fallen hero, official judiciary authorities have recently issued a verdict that isn't even half of his possible 14-year maximum sentence in a federal prison. Santa Clara County Superior Court Judge Aaron Persky sentenced Turner to six months in a county prison, because "... his lack of a criminal history made him feel that imposing a six-month jail sentence with probation was appropriate." Turner's father, Dan A. Turner, must be ecstatic after hearing the verdict because he's oh-so terribly concerned that his son "will never be his happy go lucky self with that easy going personality and welcoming smile."
Now, his son will have the chance to follow through with his promise of "... educating other college students age students about the dangers of alcohol consumption and sexual promiscuity." A talking tour. As if that could fix everything.
If the senior Turner sincerely believes that his son should be in public advising other students how to behave under the pressures of alcohol, then this man is incredibly delusional and twisted. His son did not drink too much or have sex with too many people; he raped an unconscious 23-year-old woman who didn't even know the exact details of this horrific incident until she read about it in the news.
She read that she had been found unconscious with her dress high above her waist so that she was exposed all the way down to her feet. Prior to reading this, she just remembered being measured and photographed while she was naked in the hospital after the incident. She was poked and prodded with all the technical medical procedures needed to confirm what everyone else knew to be true: she was a rape victim. In her statement made to the court this past Thursday, she revealed Turner had indirectly approached her before the trial to inform her that "... he had hired a powerful legal attorney, expert witnesses, private investigators who were going to try and find details about my personal life to use against me, find loopholes in my story to invalidate me and my sister, in order to show that sexual assault was in fact a misunderstanding."
After that, she was accosted with millions of questions to confuse her and help prove material for Turner's innocence. Some of these questions went as far as asking how faithful she was to her boyfriend and if she was sexually active; things that would subconsciously plant poisonous seeds in the mind of the jury and portray her as the "slut" archetype that is all too familiar in victim-shaming in these cases.
Turner is a criminal even if his verdict was a light and unfit sentence of six months; the victim knows it, Stanford knows it, and he knows it. The public shouldn't remember him as a smiling young man in a jacket, but instead they should be familiar with the red-eyed visage of a newly convicted rapist.
