Cover Letter For Criminal Justice Student: Fill & Download for Free

Oh my, yes. While trying to stand out from the crowd, I accidentally (and erroneously) convinced an entire department that I was a conservative racist.A bit of context:In my senior year of college, I was facing the prospect of impending unemployment after graduation. I’d been rejected by all the grad programs to which I’d applied, and didn't have any job leads lined up since I’d been so sure I’d get into MIT. As the Spring wound down and Summer loomed large, I started casting around for a position — any position — that would pay the bills.Then, serendipitously, I saw that my alma mater was looking for a new assistant dean of admissions, no experience necessary, and they were hiring from the student body.Yes!I shot off my resume and cover letter, and within a day I’d lined up an interview.The first interview went great. I was smart. I was funny. I even had an answer for “prior leadership experience.” After a brief interview with HR, where I stated a modest salary expectation, they hooked me up with a second interview later that week.This is where things started to go horribly, horribly wrong.The second interview was pretty intense. It involved giving a 10-minute lecture to the entire admissions department, a group interview with all the deans, a mock application evaluation, and a second group interview with the assistant deans. The whole process was slated to last about 6 hours.I showed up bright and early, ready to rumble and dressed to impress. I gave a moving lecture on cancer and how it’s a product of the same forces that drive evolution, and tied it in to my mom’s struggles with the disease. Feeling great, I was ushered into the interview with the Deans.First question: “If you could change one thing about Wesleyan, what would you pick and why?”Oh fuck. I hadn’t prepped for this. My mind raced, searching for an answer that would both be insightful and would set me apart from the other six applicants who had made it this far. Come on, Nick, think of something edgy. Just say something.Aha! I had it. “I’d like to hear more conservative voices on campus. Too often in classrooms and news bulletins, discussions are dominated by liberal viewpoints, and I feel that we lose the counterpoint when that happens.” Yes! Bullet dodged.The senior dean raised his eyebrows, but didn’t follow up on it.It’s worth noting that Wesleyan is a very liberal university. Snuggled away in Middletown, Connecticut, it has a national reputation for being the place where the smart, weird kids go. It birthed Joss Whedon and Lin Manuel Miranda. Wesleyan students are almost savagely keyed into to issues of gender and sexuality, race, religion, and economic injustice.That was why I chose to go there, frankly. But some rebellious impulse reared its head at that moment and urged me to go against the grain. Stand out. Be different. I felt myself falling into character, years of Dungeons and Dragons roleplaying propelling me onward like a poorly-considered, edgy Titanic.The next dean spoke up: “So, Nicholas, the university president recently stated that Wesleyan students are lifelong idealists who will do whatever it takes to do the right thing. Would you say that describes you?” She peered at me over her glasses.How would ‘Edgy Nick’ respond to this question? I cleared my throat. “No, I don’t think so. Strong ideals are a wonderful objective, and can certainly guide us to make decisions that might propel us toward an ideal future, but reality is messy, and oftentimes what is ‘right’ is simply not feasible. I might describe ideals as ‘guidelines’, rather than actual ‘rules’.”I looked around at three sets of narrowed eyes. Whelp. Can’t back down now, otherwise they’ll think I’m a flip-flopper.Next came the mock application evaluation. I was given two complete applications, told to use my discretion to decide who to admit, and told I had an hour to do so. Then I was left alone.The first application was written by a young catholic woman named Emily. She was from Massachusetts. She had a 3.9 GPA from a prestigious private school, glowing letters of recommendation, and above average SAT scores. She was involved in drama club, she played the oboe, and was a competitive horse jumper for the previous six years. Her essay was well-written, if somewhat bland.The second application was written by a young immigrant man named Diego from the Dominican Republic. He came to the States when he was eleven, and graduated from a public high school in Chicago’s South Side with a 2.9 GPA. His letters of recommendation were extremely basic. His essay was very poorly written, but documented the struggles he and his single mother had faced in coming to America in pursuit of his father, who had abandoned them when he was 12. He lacked extracurriculars. His SAT scores varied dramatically: he scored a 740 on his math SAT, but only a 390 on English.When my hour was up, the deans once again returned to the room.“So? Who is our newest addition to the school?”Edgy Nick was ready. “Both!” I exclaimed, proud of my brilliant solution. “I think they’re both strong candidates.”The senior dean’s expression didn’t change. “No. You only get to pick one.”I frowned. Damnit. “Okay. Then I suppose I’d have to pick Emily. She has a history of academic success and is very active in her community. She has demonstrated skills in music and drama that would help the school flourish, and,” Edgy Nick grinned, internally, maliciously. TIME TO STICK IT TO THE MAN, “the fact that she rides horses competitively tells me that her family is quite wealthy. She can probably afford to pay full tuition.” This was a jab at the school’s recent decision to become “Need Aware” — a policy change that I was (and remain) personally against, but which I felt would win me points with the very department that decided this shift.“What about Diego? Why did you choose to reject him?”“Well, like I said, he’s a strong candidate. He’s has to deal with a lot of adversity in his life, and he’s clearly good at math. The problem is that Wesleyan is a very challenging school, academically, and I’m concerned that his poor grasp of English would keep him from succeeding here. There was a guy in a couple of my biology courses who was similar to Diego in a lot of ways, and he was never able to contribute to discussions, didn’t seem to understand the material, and barely managed a C- average.” Edgy Nick searched for a way to make his point in a language that The Man would understand. “It just seems wasteful for us to pay for someone to fail, when we could be letting someone pay us for the opportunity to succeed.” Slap that on a bumper sticker!“Okay,” said the associate dean, rubbing the bridge of her nose, “these students aren’t applying for a job. They are applying to study. We aren’t looking for what they can do for the school, we are looking for what we can do for them. I agree that Emily is very bright, but as you pointed out, she has all the cards already. She’s wealthy, well-supported, and has a strong community to make sure she succeeds wherever she ends up studying. Diego, on the other hand, has none of that. You can’t measure his success against hers, because they’re playing different games.”“But their letters of recommendation!” I interjected. “You’re asking me to evaluate him based on what’s in front of me, and no one has anything to say about him aside from his B- GPA!”The senior dean spoke up. “Do you know how many students go to his school?”“Um, no? Should I?”He looked at the associate dean. “Six thousand?”“Eight,” she corrected.“Eight thousand. They have, I believe, 122 teachers. That’s, what, sixty students per teacher? You really think that his teachers are going to know anything about him, personally?”“Well, her recommendations—”“Emily went to a school of 200 kids. Total. She even says so in the essay. It’s not hard to have a personal relationship with your teachers if the class is small enough!”I cringed, inwardly. I’d gone to a school of 40 students. Everyone there had known most of the intimate details of my life. I could hardly imagine a high school where teachers didn’t know everything about their students. Faced with that shared privilege, I got stupidly defensive on Emily’s behalf.“Wait, so Emily’s glowing recommendations are a bad thing?”“No, of course not. I’m saying that Diego’s recommendations aren’t necessarily a bad thing. His situation and life experiences give him a perspective that could be very beneficial to our school.”“I’m uncomfortable with the implication that Diego’s experiences are inherently more valuable than Emily’s,” I countered. “Different, sure, but not more valuable!”“Okay!” the associate dean interjected brightly, “I think Nicholas has made his preference known, and he makes some interesting points. Maybe we should move onto the next portion of the interview?” She directed this at the senior dean, who nodded.The deans left and were soon replaced by two assistant deans. These were young people, like myself; recent Wesleyan alumni. The atmosphere was somewhat frosty when they entered, but I couldn’t quite understand why.We made introductions. Veejay, an Indian guy from Jersey. Sandy, a Vietnamese woman. Sandy smiled at me. Veejay didn’t.“So…” Veejay consulted my file. “…Nicholas. Could you tell me what you think about social justice issues?”I was at a loss. I didn’t think anything about social justice issues. I was vaguely aware that “social justice” referred to race relations, or something, but I half remembered that harsh drug sentencing was considered a social justice issue, and that made me wonder whether the term referred to criminal justice, and whether I should be talking about laws or policy or fairness or….Luckily, Edgy Nick was ready to jump in.“I think it’s important, but it’s not the only thing that’s important. Like, the issues are real, but the things we do about them aren’t always good. Like…” damnit, think of a social justice issue! “… affirmative action. I think it’s an imperfect solution to a very real problem, but in a lot of ways it can hurt, rather than help.” I couldn’t have told you how it hurt, or what I was basing that on, but it sounded good. It sounded like I knew what I was talking about, even though I really, really didn’t.Veejay didn’t say anything. He just stood up and walked out of the room. Sandy conducted the rest of the interview.Only later in my dorm room, while trying to process how things could have gone so wrong, did I realize how I must have come across.“Idealism is overrated.”“I think we need more conservatives on campus, to get more diversity of ideas.”“The rich white girl’s experiences are just as valuable to the diversity of ideas as the guy’s who’s overcome all sorts of adversity.”“Affirmative action is a flawed system that does more harm than good.”Holy shit, I’m an asshole.That’s when I learned the dangers of being “edgy” around people with whom you agree. You end up playing Devil’s Advocate all the way to Hell.

First, don’t heed the bullshit.If you do not have a Bachelors degree in criminal justice or a related field (public administration, management, etc.), start working on it. There are student loans out there that love to give money away.If you have a BA, consider a Masters degree in criminal justice leadership and management from an online university with a great reputation for developing police leaders; John Jay or Sam Houston State in Texas.Take as many leadership/management classes that you can find (law enforcement related is good but from the business sector even better).Work on your promotions and an officer and be sure to learn each level of the craft of supervision before you move on.If you are in a state-wide retirement system you can start looking for chief’s positions as your retirement will transfer over as long as you are in-state. If not, be sure you are vested in the retirement system before you move on.Join the International Association of Chiefs of Police (as an associate member is fine). They are an excellent resource for articles and updates, provide excellent training if you can afford to attend. Their monthly magazine also provides job announcements. Also, your municipal government association/risk management system may have an online job line. After you have your BA and are in a position of some supervision, I suggest you join the Police Executive Research Forum (PERF). It would not hurt to join associations for command officers; National Organization of Black Law Enforcement Executives (NOBLE) and the Hispanic American Police Command Officer Association (HAPCOA). You do not need to be of those particular ethnicities to join.When you are ready, get professional help in putting together your resume. That plus your cover letter will sell you as a finalist before you are invited for an interview. Chief positions for midsize cities 100,000 - 250,000 population will draw a lot of applicants. Smaller communities will likely draw 50–75 applicants. Be ready to “aim small,” 80% of law enforcement agencies in the US have 25 or fewer officers.Take a police instructor course and/or join Toastmasters International to help your oral communication skills and give you confidence when speaking before an assessment center.Don’t be dissuaded when you get rejection letters, just keep submitting applications.Finally, be very careful on what you say and who you say it to. It will absolutely come back and bite you in the butt. Keep your opinions private. Look up the word sagacity in a dictionary. Study it and practice it. Good luck.

This answer may contain sensitive images. Click on an image to unblur it.I’ll open with a warning: what follows isn’t short, isn’t simple, and isn’t likely to leave anyone feeling entirely satisfied.But it is important. Deeply so.Like many, my first exposure to this story was via Emily Doe’s victim impact statement — an eloquent essay that became a key plank in the scaffolding of the #MeToo movement, itself the most overdue reckoning of our time.Emily referred to her statement as a “tiny fire”. It was anything but. It raged, far and beautifully. Reading it brought back the tears I shed with those I love as they wrestled with their own aftermaths. If you’d asked me in the hours after, I would have signed any petition and joined any march. I was inspired, and angry.That’s the thing about righteous anger: it burns.But once my fire had time to reduce down to coals, I decided to learn more about the judge in question. I wanted to understand why he did it.What I found was unnerving.The Big PictureI’ve invested a lot of time into this case over the past two years. I’ve reviewed all but one of the public trial documents, most of them multiple times. I’ve waded through somewhere around 100 additional articles, transcripts, and recaps. I’ve checked, cross-checked, and re-checked. This is by far the most work I’ve put into a single piece of writing. I wanted to be clear, and sure.My conclusion?Righteous anger blinded us to some really important things.This shouldn’t be surprising. We’re hardwired for clean narratives. We love being presented with binary action options that let us make our stance towards larger issues known. We love to reduce the chaos of the world to simple propositions that let us clearly place ourselves on the right side of the things we hate.Trouble is, Judge Persky’s recall was always more complicated than a simple referendum on how we feel about sexual assault. A vote against him was never a vote for justice or a vote against rape culture. It was a vote for a story. And it so happens that there was far more to this particular story than most of us knew.For a distilled version of my thesis, I’m going to quote (of all things) a random Reddit user:My lawyer friend had this take on it: “Let’s be clear: Brock turner is a piece of sh*t. The justice system failed this woman. But when our jails and criminal courtrooms are still primarily filled with poor / black / brown / undocumented defendants, scaring judges out of showing leniency is not achieving justice. The Brock Turners of the world will not pay for Persky’s recall.”That last line really gets to the heart of it.The Brock Turners of the world will not pay for Persky’s recall.If true, this suggests a crucial question: if the recall won’t hurt Brock or those like him, who will it hurt?That’s what I want to explore in what follows.Just four quick caveats/clarifications before we get into the meat of it:Brock Turner did a terrible thing. I have no interest in exonerating him. What follows is less about him and more about modern journalism, our treatment of Judge Persky, and our ideas of justice more broadly.For the purposes of cutting length, I’ve moved everything not vital to this story into a supplemental post. You’ll find an index of the topics it covers at the end.Some who read this will likely have cast a ballot in favor of Persky’s recall. Please know I have zero desire to confront anyone for their vote. My aim is to deconstruct the popular narratives behind the campaign for going-forward value only.I’m neither a lawyer nor a trained journalist. While I’ve done fairly extensive research into sexual abuse and its prosecution in the course of past roles, I’m not a credentialed expert there either. As such, I’ve gone to lengths to link authoritative sources as I go.That all in mind, let’s dive in.The Story of What HappenedIf you boil down the majority reporting, you get a story something like this:A rich white kid was caught raping an unconscious woman behind a dumpster, then was let off with a slap on the wrist because his rich white judge was also once a Stanford athlete.Some of the better outlets were a bit more nuanced than that, but they were few.What We KnowAt 12:19am on January 18th, 2015, Emily Doe receives a call from her boyfriend in Philadelphia. She’d just left him a voicemail that he couldn’t make sense of. When she picks up, her speech is heavily slurred. The boyfriend is concerned. He tells Emily to find her sister.Unbeknownst to him, Emily’s sister had left two minutes earlier to take a friend somewhere safe for the night. So when Emily rings her at 12:29am, the sister is still preoccupied. She asks Emily to call her back.When Emily doesn’t, the sister both calls and texts her.She gets no response.At 1:01am, the police are dispatched. Two cyclists had found a young man, later identified as Brock Turner, thrusting atop an unconscious Emily. The cyclists tackle Brock and hold him until the campus police arrive five minutes later.The authorities find Emily out cold, her underwear in a ball next to her, her other clothes in various stages of undress. Brock has his pants on, but seems to be erect underneath.Emily doesn’t wake up for several more hours. Even after the IV drip, she’s at no less than a .22 BAC — blackout territory. When she does wake up at 4:15am, she doesn’t remember anything from after about when her sister left.The police do tests. Emily hasn’t been drugged. But the tests do confirm something else: Emily has been assaulted. No semen, but the abrasions are consistent with aggressive digital penetration. They also find Emily’s DNA on Brock’s right hand.What We Don’t KnowBetween 12:29 and 1:01, Emily Doe moved from the patio of Stanford’s Kappa Alpha house to where the cyclists found her — lying on a slope near a three-sided wooden enclosure often used to store bikes and the frat’s dumpster.No one except perhaps Brock Turner knows how Emily traveled those 116 feet, nor in what state. We do know that it was in the rough direction of his dorm, and that she had no bruises or defensive wounds consistent with a struggle. But as to what motivation drove her from the porch, we have only his word. He says he invited her to his room. She doesn’t remember anything.Some time after his arrest and initial statement, Brock expands his story (which now conflicts in places with his original testimony):They had been kissing and dancing on the porch.She agreed to leave with him.On their way to his dorm, she slipped on the pine needles on the slope.They laughed about it.He leaned in and kissed her.Rather than getting up, he proposed digitally pleasing her then and there.She consented, and rubbed his back as he proceeded.He thought she climaxed.He moved on to dry-humping.He hopped off at some point because he was feeling sick.It was only then that he noticed the cyclists.He doesn’t know when Emily lost consciousness, or her name.Apart from the question of when he got off her relative to the cyclists’ arrival (they both say he dismounted and fled after they announced their presence), Brock alone knows how much of this is true. He was drunk that night, but not so drunk that he’s likely to have forgotten much. His BAC was around .16 at the time of arrest. Drunk enough, but still aware. And culpable.Sadly, we have no help from other witnesses. We know that Brock kissed Emily’s sister earlier and that he was generally acting in a hounding sort of way. The sisters and their friends teased him with a nickname based on how he resembled someone else they knew. But no one saw them together after Emily’s sister left, nor did anyone hear or see any kind of struggle or altercation.At minimum, Brock was caught dry-humping someone no longer conscious. As for how long she’d been in that state or what prior consent she may have given for that or other acts (or in which state she gave it), we have only his testimony, uncompelling as it is.The Anatomy of White PrivilegeLet’s recall the popular framing:A rich white kid was caught raping an unconscious woman behind a dumpster, then was let off with a slap on the wrist because his rich white judge was also once a Stanford athlete.Well, about that.As it happens, the Turner family isn’t exactly rich. Brock was attending Stanford on a 60% swimming scholarship. His two older siblings weren’t so lucky. All told, the three kids accumulated some $150k in student debt between them. The family wasn’t poor enough for full aid, nor wealthy enough to afford the tuitions outright. Their household income would be significant in context of Dayton, Ohio, but rather modest in context of the average Stanford student or Bay Area resident. In all likelihood, Brock’s case will leave them in or near bankruptcy.[EDIT: Brock’s mom mentions $90k in student debt for his two siblings in her testimony. I can’t recall where I got the $150k figure from, but the delta might be from Brock’s remaining costs after his scholarship.]And if the narrative isn’t quite true with Brock, it’s far less true with Judge Persky. If we look into his record, we find that:He’s a decorated advocate for mental health, AIDS awareness, and civil rights, known for generous pro bono work. His non-profit work included time on the board of the Support Network for Battered Women in Santa Clara.Before becoming a judge, he served for six years as a well-respected prosecutor focused specifically on sexually violent predators.As a judge, he had a thoroughly corroborated and very public history of ruling equally across ethnic lines. He has no record of favoring whites or disfavoring anyone else. (Some claim otherwise. We’ll get to that.)He was one of many Stanford-educated judges serving on a Bay Area court (though he actually got his law degree elsewhere).Prior to the Turner case, he’d never had an official complaint launched against him.Almost everyone who’d ever worked with him (prosecutor or defender) had only positive things to say about his character and judgment. (We’ll get more into this later too.)The entire basis of Turner’s appeal is that Persky was prejudicial against him.In other words, Turner wasn’t an overly privileged kid (apart from his skin, which we have no reason to believe played a role in the courtroom), and Persky had no particular reason to favor him.This isn’t to say that white privilege in courtrooms isn’t a thing. Nearly every study I’ve ever consulted says it is. But Aaron Persky happened to be one of the judges well-known for fighting against that particular problem.[EDIT: The original suggested that Persky’s wife was African-American. I got that wrong. She’s Asian-American. Mea culpa.]To The Left, To The LeftIt’s worth noting that Aaron Persky is, by all accounts, almost stereotypical in his philosophical consistency. Like many Bay Area natives, he seems a dyed-in-the-wool progressive, possibly from the womb.Putting that into practical terms as it concerned his judgeship:He favored restorative over punitive justice (i.e., he worried more about improving the future than correcting the past).He had a fondness for tailored punishments (which data suggests are more likely to produce positive outcomes).He was against prison in general, especially for first-time offenders (unless there was reason to believe that their release would lead to re-offense or some other public harm).Media distortion aside, I think part of our problem with Turner’s sentence has a lot to do with the difficulty of this philosophy. Progressive values are tough. They ask us to accept hard truths about the limits of eye-for-an-eye rulings. They ask us to take a much longer view of things. They give us precious little catharsis.As a consensus of qualified parties later acknowledged (we’ll get to them), most progressive judges would have placed a broadly similar sentence on Turner as Persky did. If we have a problem with that, it’s really with progressivism itself, not with a man who had long been an exemplary and consistent steward of the values he was appointed to uphold.The Day of JudgmentThe jury found Brock Turner guilty of three crimes:unlawful sexual penetration of an intoxicated personunlawful sexual penetration of an unconscious personassault with intent to commit rape of an intoxicated or unconscious personAs he often did, Judge Persky opted to follow the Santa Clara County Probation Department’s recommendation to the letter, sentencing Turner to six months in county jail, three years of probation, a year of mandatory counselling, lifetime sex-offender status, and a handful of non-trivial financial penalties.That’s a lot. But the crux of this particular case is that we have a tendency to over-focus on just one of those punishments. Our diet of scripted crime dramas has tuned us to see prison sentences as the real meat. Everything else feels trivial and insufficient to answer the demands of anything we’d agree upon as full justice.Well, here’s the thing: prison time is not intended to be the real punishment.There’s been a growing consensus in the legal community (particularly in progressive circles) that two things are particularly punitive:The restrictions and stigma that come with a felony conviction.The restrictions and stigma that come with being a registered sex offender.Around a week before Turner’s sentencing, Judge Frederic Block of the Eastern District Court of New York dropped whatever the judicial equivalent of a hit record is. Over the course of 42 pages, he artfully outlined what progressive judges have been saying for decades: that the 50,000 or so various legal restrictions applied to felons across the US often produce something quite other than their intended civic effect.Sexual offenders have it even harder, particularly in states like Ohio (where Turner is from, and to where he returned). I get more into the other downsides of sex offender status in the appendix, but suffice it to say that they are many and meaningful. As just one: he’ll have to register in the same category as pedophiles.Being honest, I find it improbable that the accompanying downsides could fail to deter anyone capable of being deterred. Even before his sentence was compounded by the public attention, it’s exceedingly difficult to imagine a scenario in which a would-be rapist could look at the totality of Brock’s punishment and consider it a slap on the wrist worth risking.It’s for this reason that progressive judges tend to eschew prison time unless especially warranted. In their calculus, most facilities are under-funded and over-crowded anyway. And while long sentences might give the illusion of justice, the evidence (see appendix) says they aren’t actually any better at producing rehabilitation or deterrence. As such, adding another prisoner at taxpayer expense only makes sense when the taxpaying public is receiving some extra benefit in return.Put another way, progressives judges tend to use prison as a means of protecting the public, not punishing the perpetrator. It’s just not that useful at the latter.And so, given the cost and diminishing returns of imprisonment, the relatively low risk of re-offence, and the presence of what they felt was sufficient empathy and remorse, two seasoned Santa Clara County probation officials, both of them women, decided there was no compelling public benefit in Brock Turner spending more than six months behind bars.Judge Persky, in turn, found no cause to disagree. He handed down the recommended sentence with detailed commentary as to the mechanics of his thinking. (While the infamous phrases “severe impact on him” and “I take him at his word” do appear in there, the context is other than you may think.)Though Justice Be Thy PleaNow, if a longer sentence does little-to-nothing to improve deterrence, little-to-nothing to reduce recidivism, and eats up costly public resources better spent on increasing conviction rates (which very much do matter), we’re left with a very important question:Who exactly is benefited by Brock Turner being in prison?This returns us to rival definitions of justice. Is it the gut pleasure of evil being overwhelmed with swift retribution? Is it the cold math of reciprocity? Is it maximum possible deterrence? Is it the measured response of a society determined to salvage what they can as best they can? Or, as some wonder, is it the victim getting what they want?Emily’s impact statement was published on June 3rd, 2016, exactly a month after her interview with the probation officer. A good chunk of it is dedicated to revisiting their discussion and how the latter party interpreted it.While we can (and should) be sympathetic to the inadequate amount of time that the two spent together, what Emily said at the time seems pretty clear.Note that last half-line. Then note what Emily says in her letter (emphasis mine):I told the probation officer I do not want Brock to rot away in prison. I did not say he does not deserve to be behind bars.Unless we’re going to quibble about the difference between “need” and “deserve”, there’s a discrepancy there. Is it possible that the probation officer paraphrased incorrectly? If anyone made that claim, I didn’t come across it.[EDIT: I suppose you could read Emily’s comment as “I didn’t say that last half-line from the report in any form”, but that would be a curious way to phrase it. I guess we’ll see if she clarifies in her forthcoming book.]Based on what Emily says in her impact statement, it seems more probable that three other factors played into her shift:The meeting wasn’t long enough for full nuance. The probation officer wasn’t wrong in her transcript. She just got a rushed, incomplete picture.When Emily made her statement, she wasn’t privy to what Brock would say in his. As such, what she suggested was predicated on her assumption of a certain remorse on his end.It wasn’t until she read his statement and the defense’s sentencing memo that it became clear to her that neither she nor the process had reached Brock in the way she’d hoped.To give a quick taste of how Turner framed it:I am the sole proprietor of what happened on the night that these people’s lives were changed forever. […] I can never forgive myself for imposing trauma and pain on [her]. It debilitates me to think that my actions have caused her emotional and physical stress that is completely unwarranted and unfair. […] I wish I had the ability to go back in time and never pick up a drink that night, let alone interact with Emily. […] At this point in my life, I never want to have a drop of alcohol again. […] I know I can impact and change people’s attitudes towards the culture surrounded by binge drinking and sexual promiscuity. […] I made a mistake, I drank too much, and my decisions hurt someone.He’s basically saying “everything between us was consensual — I just made a mistake in not recognizing how drunk she was, mostly because I was really drunk myself”.Emily felt this fell short of full honesty and remorse. I’d tend to agree.The trouble is that to expect more was a very bad idea.Defense attorney Nicholas Wooldridge explains it neatly:[The statement that] Brock's victim read during the sentencing hearing underscored the detachment between what victims expect from the criminal justice and what the criminal justice system is designed to deliver. Her victim impact statement was an attack on the system—she wanted a trial where Brock admits his guilt—that's not what happens in an adversarial system. A trial is a contact sport with a binary outcome: guilty or not guilty. The victim expected something from the criminal justice system that it was never designed to provide outside of the movies, at least, so long as fundamental principles such as the presumption of innocence or due process are to have any meaning. The victim is very much entitled and has a right to expect some responsibility, accountability, remorse and perhaps understanding and support from her attacker (by not having put her through the trial process in the first place)—but the criminal justice system is a blunt force tool not designed to provide any of the things that she desires. And, even after conviction, many defendants choose to appeal, so to expect a confession at that point is a non-starter.We can add to that a few comments from Judge Persky at sentencing:And so you have Mr. Turner expressing remorse — which I think, subjectively, is genuine — and [Emily] not seeing that as a genuine expression of remorse because he never says, “I did this. I knew how drunk you were. I knew how out of it you were, and I did it anyway.” And that — I don’t think that bridge will, probably, ever be crossed.Mr. Armstrong [Brock’s attorney] offered an explanation for that disconnect, which is that Mr. Turner, in his state of intoxication, sees the events in a certain way. And if he were to, just for the benefit of a lighter sentence or to pacify the Court or the public, come in at a sentencing hearing or any other time and state otherwise, which I’m sure defendants do all the time, he really would be not honest. I mean, I take him at his word that, subjectively, that’s his version of events. […]Once a jury renders a verdict, everybody is bound by that verdict. Everybody must accept the verdict, including Mr. Turner. But I’m not convinced that his lack of complete acquiescence to the verdict should count against him with respect to an expression of remorse, because I do find that his remorse is genuine.Emily’s counsel should have prepared her for this. From the outside, it seems that Ms. Kianerci may have been more focused on preparing a memo of her own — one meant to match her client’s in tone and effect. But however their discussions went, Emily seems to have come out with expectations sure to disappoint her. Brock didn’t get all the way to Jesus, no. But that was never likely to happen. It just wasn’t a reasonable thing to hope for in context.That said, Brock did get somewhere. In the opinion of the probation department, he demonstrated that he understood that he’d hurt Emily and why and how he needed to change. For them, that was enough.It isn’t that we shouldn’t want more from him. We’d just be unwise to pin our hopes on it. The law is frustrating like that. It almost never gives us the justice we want in our bones.But neither does any alternative we’ve ever come up with.Enter the Den MotherIf you’ve heard of this case, it’s likely because of Emily’s letter.If you have strong feelings against Judge Persky particularly, it’s likely because of Professor Michele Dauber.For those keen to really get into her bio and likely motivations, I recommend this excellent Highline piece. It’s by far the best thing I’ve read about the case in general (though that bar is low enough to be fit for a round of championship-level limbo).But for those who already feel over-invested (you have my empathy), here’s the gist of what Professor Dauber is all about:She had two direct connections to this case: (i) to sexual assault at Stanford, (ii) to Emily personally.In the first case, Dauber was an internal crusader at Stanford. She’d pushed hard to modernize what she felt were backward and antagonistic sexual assault response policies. While this introduced friction with her colleagues, that wasn’t enough to deter her from a cause she believed too just and too needful to ignore. She seems very much the type to dig her heels in when on the side of perceived righteousness.In the second case, Emily was like a daughter to her. One of Dauber’s own daughters was roughly the same age, and the two had been “inseparable” in childhood. Emily had even joined them on at least one family vacation.(As an aside, Dauber has an impressive backstory. She rose from being a homeless teenager working on her GED to a tenured position at one of the most prestigious law schools in the world, all while raising five kids in the process!)In sum, we have a tenacious advocate for women being led to apply that tenacity in the aid of a young woman she loved dearly.On the surface, there’s a lot that’s good and wholesome in this. I’m glad Stanford has her. And I’m glad Emily had someone like that in her corner.The issue is that Professor Dauber didn’t stay in the corner. Despite the obvious concerns about being too close to the case, she decided she was going to enter the ring and go after Persky personally for failing to deliver the justice she felt Emily deserved.But while intimacy clouding judgment was always going to be a concern here, there was something else too. Something more concerning.In this particular war, Professor Dauber had a hard time telling the truth.A Tale of Two SidesAs Professor Dauber’s recall campaign gained steam, the legal community began sorting themselves in two camps.Except, not really.Though much of the reporting would give the impression of arrayed forces on both sides, the ratios here were, well, not very equal.I asked around, reviewed the recall campaign’s website, combed through newspaper archives, and Googled to the best of my ability. From what I could find, precious few legal professionals, active or retired, were inclined to take Dauber’s position. I managed to identify eight in total, at least six of whom either had conspicuous causes of potential bias or a noticeably deficient understanding of the case. Some had both.In no particular order:Stanford Professor Mark Lemley (who found that Persky didn’t commit misconduct, but somehow thought he should be recalled anyway).Brandeis Professor Anita Hill (who, though I think highly of her, has her own well-known history here).California Attorney General Kamala Harris (who was stumping at the time, and spoke of the case as if she hadn’t gone deep on the details).NY Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (same as Kamala).Retired U.S. District Judge Nancy Gertner (who may or may not have actually supported the recall — the article they quote from is paywalled, and the excerpt itself is negative but inconclusive; it’s also unclear from the excerpt how well she understood the details of the case).Georgetown Professor William G. Otis (who wrote a New York Times op-ed which opens with the phrase “it is not disputed” and then carries on to list facts very much still in dispute).Stanford Professor David Palumbo-Liu (whose op-ed in The Guardian made a particularly brittle argument that Persky was racially biased based on a single ill-reasoned point of comparison).Attorney Barbara Spector (who was the plaintiff’s lawyer in the De Anza case and still seems angry at Persky about it, despite his decisions being deemed uncontroversial by nearly everyone else). [EDIT: There’s more about the De Anza case in the appendix. Nearly every article written about it as it concerns Persky omits really important context.]All considered, not exactly a weighty lot.[EDIT: I’ve taken Judge Del Pozzo off the list. The recall campaign quotes his disagreement with the Turner sentence, but fails to mention what he says minutes later in the same podcast interview: “Should he be recalled? Absolutely not.” Del Pozzo also goes on to say of Dauber’s attempt to show a pattern of favoritism in Persky’s past cases: “she fell flat on her face”. So yeah. If there’s a pattern, it’s misrepresentation on her part. See audio from 49:30.]The campaign otherwise rested on quotes from Dauber’s husband, a few politicians, a flock of random celebrities — oh, and one more retired judge.Trouble is, that last judge was LaDoris Cordell, who happens to have been the most vocal voice of the pro-Persky counter-campaign.(Best as I can tell, Dauber had some intern/assistant pull every quote that looked like it could be rhetorically favorable, context and integrity be damned.)While they were happy to quote Cordell about a different trial, they left out this more relevant gem:We did everything we could possibly do to fight the most dishonest campaign I had ever encountered. It was dishonest about who Aaron Persky was on the bench, and dishonest about his record. People were basically ill-informed about him and also about how the court system — and particularly the criminal justice system — works.She went on elsewhere to call Dauber a “bully” and “a smart, relentless, troubled human being”. So, yeah, perhaps not a star witness for the prosecution.As for the anti-recall team, support letters were signed by at least 95 law professors (including 29 from Stanford), the California Judges Association, the Santa Clara Bar Association, and quite a long list of Bay Area public defenders. Supportive op-eds appeared all across the US (and beyond).More narrowly, I was particularly interested in what those connected to the Santa Clara justice system thought. In reading those takes (here, here, here, and here), you’ll notice a common theme. The only person with direct knowledge of Persky that supported the recall seem to be Spector, a woman with a long-standing grievance not shared by her peers. The rest were effusive in their praise and/or defense.But the real kicker is that the recall was also opposed by the last three elected District Attorneys of the Santa Clara County Court — including none other than Jeff Rosen, i.e. the DA that oversaw the prosecution of Brock Turner.[EDIT: Note this quote from Rosen to the New York Times: “Most of the judges in California would have done the same thing as Judge Persky.” Also, see the appendix for more context about Rosen and Persky. The recall campaign played dumb to a great deal of background info that was rather damning to their position.]All said, it seems that the recall effort wasn’t really supported by any legal professionals with significant knowledge of Persky or the case.Which raises the question; why did it pass?History on RepeatAs the media did a decent job of making clear, recalls are extraordinary measures. There’s a reason California hadn’t passed one since 1932.To quote the California Code of Judicial Ethics:An independent judge is one who is able to rule as he or she determines appropriate, without fear of jeopardy or punishment. So long as the judge makes rulings in good faith, and in an effort to follow the law as the judge understands it, the usual safeguard against error or overreaching lies in the adversary system and appellate review.Put simply, there are better means than recall to correct otherwise good judges when they err.Of course, the sticking point here is whether or not Persky ought to be viewed as good. Professor Dauber clearly felt otherwise, pointing to what she claimed was a history of gender and racial favoritism.Well, those concerns were investigated by three bodies:The California Commission on Judicial Performance (report here).The Associated Press (findings here).Local newspaper Palo Alto Online (rundown here).Taken together, they found exactly one case where Persky did something even vaguely objectionable. And that exception concerned a somewhat obscure quirk of an interstate compact that even California’s overseer of said compact suggested was unclear to many judges.(In the interest of fairness, the recall campaign did write up a response to the CJP report. I personally found it poorly-written, misleadingly-framed, and not terribly compelling. But your mileage may vary.)Now, in the absence of any real evidence, one might wonder on what basis someone might still push for a recall?The clearest answer I can give you comes in the form of a editorial from The Mercury News (a Bay Area paper that covered the trial):The decision comes down to this: Voters need to stand up and make a statement on behalf of women and men about the seriousness of sexual assault. Persky’s sentence failed to do so to an extent that he never will again be able to serve as a respected, effective judge. He should be recalled.Bizarrely, the editors went on to concede that the recall team had cherry-picked data and that the CJP had reviewed the relevant cases and found Persky innocent of any misconduct. And yet they supported the recall anyway because…?It may not be fair to Persky, who is a decent man and an able judge. […] But opportunities such as the Turner case to alter longstanding cultural problems are rare. It’s imperative that Santa Clara County lead where Persky failed when given the opportunity.I struggle deeply with that thinking. The idea of offering up innocent sacrifices in the name of progress is Bronze Age thinking. We have a long history of that approach ushering in grotesque unintended consequences. We also have mines of data telling us that increasing social pressure on judges inevitably leads to less overall justice.Even so, the editors hand-waved those concerns away, suggesting that any damage a recall might unleash had already been summoned anyway.Well, here’s the thing: all available evidence suggests that this take is wrong.Paying the PiperDo you know what happens when you make judges afraid of being perceived as soft on crime?To quote the Dean of Law at Berkeley:Efforts to recall judges for light sentences encourage judges to impose maximum penalties out of fear that anything else could cost them their positions. After all, no one has begun a recall when a judge imposed an outrageously high punishment, such as in the first case I argued in the Supreme Court where my client received a sentence of 50 years to life under California’s “three strikes law” for stealing $153 worth of videotapes.Judicial independence is crucial to upholding the rule of law, and history shows that it is lost when judges fear removal for their unpopular decisions. This is not a new realization.Not new indeed. As per a metastudy by the Brennan Center (NYU Law) in 2015, more public pressure on judges invariably leads to longer sentences and more death penalties. This is something we’ve understood for a while.And, as with so many things, this is worse for minorities. Every “tough on crime” push falls heaviest on their shoulders (which statistically has nothing to do with how often they commit crimes). This is cruelty for them.Perhaps most perverse of all, longer sentences can also result in fewer men being held accountable for sexual assault. From my own work with shelters and sexual-assault counsellors, female victims have a tendency to be reluctant to name and charge their assailants when the penalty is perceived as being too severe.So, the net outcome of Persky’s recall?Judge Persky, stripped of his judgeship, had to take the numbers off his house because his address was doxed online.Judges, terrified of being “Perskied”, will now rule more harshly and with less discretion.More bills like Assembly Bill 2888 will introduce new mandatory minimums (again leading to diminished judicial discretion).Fewer men like Brock Turner are going to be prosecuted.Who exactly is winning here?A Better WayMy heart breaks for victims of abuse. I know what it’s like to weep with them. I have an idea of what it takes for them to rebuild, and how difficult it can be for them to relearn how to feel safe and whole. We should have deep empathy.To quote Emily (emphasis my own):I stood [in the shower] examining my body beneath the stream of water and decided I didn’t want it anymore. I was terrified of it. I didn’t know what had been in it, if it had been contaminated, who had touched it. I wanted to take off my body like a jacket and leave it at the hospital with everything else.On that morning, all that I was told was that I had been found behind a dumpster, potentially penetrated by a stranger, and that I should get retested for HIV because results don’t always show up immediately. But for now, I should go home and get back to my normal life. Imagine stepping back into the world with only that information.Imagine that indeed.There’s a lot there to chew on, and a lot we need to fix. But doing so is going to take far more than casting a ballot. These aren’t problems we can abstract or outsource. If we want culture to change, we have to roll up our sleeves and do the messier, much harder work.As a short list of what that might entail:Demand better journalism. Most of the reporting on this case had negative value. Lazily rewriting a trending story for clickshare is how the press dies. Why was the Highline piece the only coverage that helped me really understand the case?Demand increased budgets. Emily said she had a “fifteen minute” conversation with the probation officer, most of which was spent reviewing legal procedures. That isn’t sufficient. If we want victims to feel like justice has been served, the most important factor is making sure they feel (and are) heard.Train and volunteer as crisis counselors. Most sexual assault victims get (at most) a half-dozen sessions with a qualified therapist. They need far more support than that. Every victim should have people they can turn to for help — for as long as it takes.Train and volunteer as youth mentors. Teaching consent is critical. Young men like Brock Turner need to be told by every adult in their various orbits when to stop and why. This message can never be repeated often enough by enough different people. Millions of teens are still unclear on the basics.Watch over our friends. Victim-blaming is a problem. But that doesn’t mean we don’t need more dialogue about responsible partying. Anyone with a BAC 3 to 4 times the legal limit needs to be cared for. Try as we might (and must), we can’t catch and cure all the predators out there. But we can limit the opportunities for them to act (while also reducing the risk of other non-predatorial safety concerns).Support and celebrate wins. The conviction rate for sexual abuse is well under 1%. When it touches those near us, we need to walk alongside them through what can be an enormously draining process. Many won’t pursue charges because they worry about their own ability to get to the other side intact. That’s far more bearable with cheerleaders and warm voices saying over and over again “we will win together”.What happened to Emily should be a spur to all of us — not towards reflexive action, but towards creating a world in which young women like her don’t have to wake up alone in a hospital room wondering what happened, if their body is still their own, and what we’re going to do on their behalf.Covered in the appendix:What else should people know about Judge Persky’s background?Didn’t Judge Persky favor student athletes in the De Anza case?What would a normal sentence be for Turner’s specific crimes?What actually deters would-be offenders from sexual crimes?What’s the basis of Turner’s appeal?What about that letter from Turner’s father?What other motivations may Professor Dauber have had?Does it matter that Professor Dauber was never a lawyer?What impact does being on a sexual offender list have on one’s life?How likely is it that Turner took a picture of the victim?How aware was Turner that what he was doing was criminal?Don’t Turner’s comments about drinking prove that he still doesn’t understand what he did wrong?What’s the real purpose of victim impact statements?EDIT: I published my first draft here on June 18th, 2018, then made some cosmetic edits in the days following. I’ve now returned a year later to give it another once-over. See the edit log for a full list of changes (most for clarity).