(hooves trotting) 20-year-old swimming star brock (somber music) turner, the 19-year-old former all-american. >> the star swimmer at stanford university. >> contender for the olympics. raping an unconscious woman. intoxicated, and unconscious. one >> passed up behind the dumpster. drunk -- behind a stanford dumpster. >> [sirens] >> your honor, if it is all, right i would like to address the defendant directly. you don't know me, but you've been inside me, and that's why we are here today. but >> the victim of that headlines, by releasing a heart wrenching letter, detailing the rape and its aftermath. >> he's got over 15 million views on buzzfeed alone. >> you don't know me, but you've been inside me. >> and that's why we're here today. >> i was found unconscious, with my hair disheveled, long necklace wrapped around my neck. >> my bare skin and head have been rubbing against the ground behind a dumpster, while interact freshman was hunting my half naked, unconscious body. >> i read that according to him, i liked it. >> your damage was concrete, stripped of titles, degrees, and -- >> my damage was internal, unseen. icat >> thinking to myself, the court system doesn't deserve -- >> even if you win the battle of proving your case in court, you still have to convince a judge that a prison sentence is appropriate. >> turner faced up to 14 years in prison, and he got six months. >> a slap on the wrist for a privileged white sexual offender an elite university. >> my first response is wow, that doesn't sound right, that must be white privilege going on here. >> because of good behavior in prison, turner was released this morning after just three months behind bars. >> we've got to fight for a world without rape. it is time to take a stand. what has happened here is unacceptable. >> there's near new pressure tonight aimed at removing the california judge. >> aaron persky is coming under fire. >> activists have targeted judge persky through a recall election. >> we need judges who understand sexual assault and domestic violence. judge persky does not. [applause] >> people widely recognized that women who have been victimized by men have not received justice. >> people have just had enough, they have had enough of women being marginalized. >> numbers are in, 62% of the voters recalling judge persky. >> persky is the first california judge recalled since 1932. and what was also viewed as one of the first electoral tests of the me too movement. >> when a fire is started, and i think of this and anger of over this case as a kind of fire, a lot of things are going to get burned. >> ♪ ♪ ♪ >> before i became district attorney, i was a deputy district attorney for 15 years. one >> of the concepts within justice is holding someone accountable for what they have done. >> frustrated prosecutors say this isn't justice. >> i had hoped for more time. we fought for more time, the victim deserves more time. >> i felt that i had failed chanel. >> i disagreed with the sentence, and i told judge frisky that. a lot of campus sexual assault cases have been boiling over, and many have not gone the way that the public wanted. so, a lot of people were surprised that i opposed the recall. >> i thought the recall was wrong, i can very strongly support women's rights, and work vigorously to uphold the dignity of women, and i can support the independents of judges. the judge in this case had the legal right to make the decision that he made. i think that it was the wrong decision, but the law allowed him to make that decision. what if that judges is deciding whether these abortion regulations are lawful? and the judge is in a place where a lot of people don't like abortion. we want the judge to say, i'm living in kansas, and so i know what people here think, so i'm going to do what they want. do you want the judge to follow the law? >> judge persky was fair in his rulings during the trial, and we look to whether we could appeal the sentence. but we realized, quickly, that the sentence was legal, the judge had the discretion to sentence that way. the probation department recommended it. >> if we were to recall every judge we would disagree with, we would have no judges >> judging is the best job in the world, and the worst job in the world. >> all of the drama of the human experience is played out in a courtroom. >> these are photos of when i started judging in 1982. and this was a big day, there had never been a black woman judge in northern california, ever. >> i consider myself a feminist. and feminism, to me, means i am aware of, and care about issues that impact women. >> recall, celebrated as a win for girls and women. there is no such thing. >> when i found out who the judge was, aaron persky, i began reading transcripts. the probation report, and that's when i said wait a minute, put the brakes on here. >> the community, the public, we were being misled. and, those of us who know this need to speak out. >> >> i'm jeff rosen, the district attorney of santa clara county. my office prosecutes sexual assault. >> i've sentenced people convicted of sexual assault. >> vote no recall of judge persky. >> judge persky's bias is a threat to the rule of law. >> the idea of racial bias. >> laws against sexual violence mean nothing of the judges who enforce them are biased like judge persky. >> there is an effort to say no, this wasn't a one-off, this is a pattern with him. >> so they cherry pick five cases out of the hundreds and hundreds of cases over ten years. >> in these cases we're all plea bargains. >> these are situations where the prosecution and the defense reached an agreement on the sentence. i think those are much different than the kind of case we have with brock turner. >> the judge, the role we play, we get presented the plea bargain. and if the plea bargain is not violent if of the law, we approve the plea bargains. now sometimes judges bust a plea, but it rarely happens, because it's a deal. >> the guardian, they do this big story it says, raul ramirez to be sentenced to three years in prison for a case with similarities to stanford sexual assault case, for which procter & gamble serve only six months. so right off the top, judge persky didn't sentence raul ramirez. ramirez was a plea bargain, judge persky was not the judge who accepted the plea bargain, and he was not the sentencing judge. but to the recall people, it didn't matter. >> judge persky has shown a clear bias in favor of men of privilege, in favor of people who abused women, rape women. and we are asking the commission to take action to remove judge persky. >> the commission on judicial performance, the body that disciplines judges if they misbehave, if they engage in misconduct, did a thorough investigation into judge persky, into his track record, and into the five cases alleged by the recall people to show bias, as well as his handling of the proctor nor case. >> the commission on judicial performance cleared him with wrongdoing, with no clear evidence of misconduct with his ruling. >> there was no bias. it wasn't even a close case. >> i absolutely think that white privilege informed the brock turner case. but in ways that are complicated. the sentencing guidelines recognize that he was a college student, that people saw with potential, with no record. and this stands in contrast to how the system would see a 19-year-old black kid from a poor neighborhood, who is a defendant. increasing sentencing, broadening the definitions of crimes, prosecuting more people, we all have this imagination that it will get at the powerful privileged criminal offenders. but criminal law doesn't equalize the world. criminal law does the opposite. criminal law exacerbates inequality. hi, my name is -- i am a professor at the university of colorado law school, and i really want to explore the role that the feminist movement has played in our current state of racialized mass incarceration. this feminist sensibility often has translated into tough on crime laws. and i've heard this a lot from feminists, right. we can be even prison abolitionists everywhere else, but not for sexual violence. that they don't have a general pro tough on crime community value, but they have a general protest on sex crime community value. 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(♪♪) joanna gaines: discoveries at saint jude helped this kid beat cancer at age two. marget: and now this kid has three kids. chip gaines: and that's what we do at saint jude. subject: give thanks for the healthy kids in your life and give a gift that could last a lifetime. i'm free to grow. i'm free to learn. i'm free to make the next big thing. contra costa college is free for full-time students, which makes you free to explore all the incredible opportunities unleashed by higher learning. start your future and apply today at contracosta.edu/free - he is an elected judge and he needs to be responsive to community values. start your future and apply today at contracosta.edu/free he is an elected judge, and he and he has to both understand where the community is needs to be responsive to community values. and he has to both understand where the community is with respect to sexual assault and the need to protect our daughters while they are in college. >> judges, for years, have already been reflecting those community values. but i think it's gotten to the point in the united states where accountability means rocking in jail. >> our norm's prison, that's what's been imposed on us as communities of color. i think about our communities of values, values of rehabilitation, and that incarceration in the prisons and in the jails are not the only solutions to it. >> as a participatory defense organizer at -- i, and a lot of the people support families who are facing the -- juvenile systems. and we walk families through that system, to impact the outcomes of their cases. and transform the landscape of power in the courts. >> how long have you've been in here? 15 years. >> we can show his life before that. >> has he thought about the -- stuff? >> yeah. >> i oppose the recall. because i felt that it was a misguided solution. the recall acquainted accountability with long sentences, and increases of mass incarceration. the way that the families have talked about -- the way that maybe the legal community and politicians talk about recall were two different conversations. -- ♪ ♪ ♪ >> judges in california and beyond are concerned about getting -- . >> as soon as the recall was announced, an empirical study found that sentences in california immediately increased by 30%. ♪ ♪ ♪ >> and the effect wasn't on the next brock turner, it was on the young people of color that come into our -- >> embedded within the american criminal legal system is a whole cascade of biases, starting from where the police are deployed, to which cases the prosecutors will take, to who gets convicted or's over charge to plea to the amount of sentencing they get. >> long sentences, disproportionately affect people who are nothing like barack turner. >> the people who suffer the most are low income and people of color. ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ >> we've seen judges stare families down in the face and say, i'm going to take your loved one away from you. those are the kind of judges who should be questions, who use incarceration as the first and only re-sort. mass incarceration separates families. our homes, our streets, our neighborhoods, our schools are drained of parents of children, of grandparents who should be together with families. instead, they have to form a relationship behind a glass. >> there is this sikh moral instinct that somebody who does wrong should have consequences for that. >> -- we're brock turner was sentenced to just six months in jail. >> serving just half his jail term. >> three months of a six month sentence. >> i've got bad guy -- >> that is the type of sentence you get for a sack of weed. for raping someone, it's another pass that they are giving. >> the media uniformly covered this as a case of under punishment, as a slap on the wrist. barack turner was convicted of felony sexual assault. he was sent to jail, he was placed on a registry. he has to register as a sex offender for the rest of his life. he is restricted in where he can live, work, with whom he can associate. >> if you don't know somebody who's been on a registry. if you have no relation to that, then you might imagine that this is nothing. >> there is no one more vocal in defense of chenal than i am. but, the recall is not the right way to protect future victims of sexual assault, and prevent a another brock turn from happening. >> we need to shift our frame and thinking, about how to deal not just even with violence against women, but all kinds of violence as dysfunctional social problems. >> the energy and the kind of anger that really came through in the recall, was to quench the public's thirst for punishment. and for vengeance. do we want a legal system that does that? hell no. if we look historically, it was people of color, low income people who got slammed in the courts. as a feminist, that's not what i think the feminist movement should be about. >> it wasn't that brock turner didn't deserve the kind of careful analysis that the judge gave him. it's that everyone does. >> [crowd chanting] >> today, we have a real opening, because of the tireless work of racial justice grassroots advocates. but other forces can put back on that momentum. >> one of them can be when feminists, who are rightly and importantly seeking sexual justice, when they valorize that system of harsh punishment, all of the public work that has been done to see that system for what it is, can fade. seeking harsh sentences within our mass incarceration system, is just a poor way to try to bend the moral arc towards justice. ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ only pay for what you need. ♪liberty. liberty. liberty. liberty.♪ (♪♪) kevin! kevin? kevin? ooh, nice. kevin, where are you? kevin?!?!?.... hey, what's going on? 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>> well only made this film because we wanted to change the conversation. we felt like metoo media had really dropped the ball, on the important things to consider. and that activists, public defenders, lawyers, scholars at the times said if you recall a judge who has a fairly lenient pattern of sentencing, the effects aren't going to be on the next brock turner, because our criminal legal system suffers from systemic bias and racism, the effects are going to be on low income and people of color. and we now know that to be true. and so, with this information in mind, we really want to change what the conversation was. >> well at least some legal scholars were articulating some of those concerns. so, -- who is a feminist law professor, has always railed about what she calls the feminist war on crime. she has talked about the way in which this carceral feminism has really exacerbated the inequalities in the criminal justice system. so, let's hear a soundbite from her now. >> increasing sentencing, rotting in the definitions of crimes, prosecuting more people. we all have this imagination that it will get the powerful privileged criminal defenders. but criminal law doesn't equalize that way. criminal law does the opposite. criminal law exacerbates many problems. >> so if criminal law exacerbates inequalities, what do we do in a situation like the brock turner scenario, where we have an unspeakable crime, and yet we have this judge who wants to be lenient but the sentence feels like it hits too little. >> yeah, i think what we hope the film does, it's a call to step back from our most carceral impulses, and to ask