Before he showed leniency to Stanford swimmer and rapist Brock Turner, Judge Aaron Persky made court rulings that appeared to favor a group of De Anza College baseball players accused of a gang rape, the victim’s lawyer said Thursday.
The controversial calls came during a 10-week civil trial back in 2011 that ended with a handful of private settlements and the jury letting two defendants off the hook, lawyer Barbara Spector told the Daily News.
“The scope of the judge’s discretion was very wide. Having said that, I felt overall the decisions he made favored the defendants more than the plaintiff,” Spector told The News.
In one such ruling, Persky allowed lawyers for the baseball players to show Facebook photos of the female plaintiff socializing in revealing clothing more than six months after the alleged sex assault.
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“I was disappointed that the Facebook pictures were allowed into evidence,” Spector said.
“The defendants said they were introduced to show she was not damaged and was at a party in October of the same year, but the prejudicial impact of those photos was far, far greater than their probative value,” she said.
The photos had nothing to do with what happened on March 3, 2007, the day her client said she was gang-raped by the teammates while 17 years old and blackout drunk at a house party, the lawyer said.
This January 2015 booking photo released by the Santa Clara County Sheriff’s Office shows Brock Turner.
(AP)
In one of the photos shown at trial, the victim reportedly was depicted wearing a garter belt and fishnet stockings.
In another ruling in the De Anza case, Persky allowed one of the defendants to offer evidence on his own behalf during trial after he refused to answer discovery questions by asserting his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination, Spector said.
“I’ve never had that happen before,” she said. “In civil cases you prepare based on pretrial discovery. I always cross examine based on discovery to deal with inconsistencies.”
Spector said her case was strong and included eyewitness testimony from three female De Anza College soccer players – Lauren Bryeans, April Grolle and Lauren Chief Elk – who said they broke into the room during the alleged attack and found the highly intoxicated minor in a semi-comatose state with vomit on her face.
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“They were heroes,” she said of the soccer players.
The case was heard in civil court because former Santa Clara County District Attorney Dolores Carr decided not to pursue the charges recommended by the sheriff. She called the incident “abhorrent” in an opinion piece for the San Jose Mercury News but said her hands were tied because the victim didn’t remember what happened and the credibility of the witnesses would be attacked due to alcohol consumed at the party.
De Anza College
Persky, meanwhile, remains the subject of a grassroots effort to have him recalled.
Detractors including Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) have blasted the six-month jail sentence he gave to Turner, saying it sent the “wrong message” following the swimmer’s conviction for assault with intent to rape, sexually penetrating an intoxicated person with a foreign object and sexually penetrating an unconscious person with a foreign object.
Turner’s victim, a 23-year-old graduate of the University of California at Santa Barbara, wrote a powerful victim-impact statement that went viral and drew an international outcry over the sentence.
But Persky, who himself attended Stanford and was captain of the men’s lacrosse team, has his defenders as well.
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“While I strongly disagree with the sentence that Judge Persky issued in the Brock Turner case, I do not believe he should be removed from his judgeship,” Santa Clara County District Attorney Jeff Rosen said Monday.
ndillon@nydailynews.com
