The Stanford rapist's father doesn't think his son should go to jail

Screenshot Via YouTube

Ex-Stanford swimmer Brock Turner.

Last week, ex-Stanford swimmer Brock Turner was sentenced to six months in jail for the rape of an unconscious woman in 2015. 

But Turner's father doesn't think his son should go to jail at all.   

In a letter obtained from the public court file and posted to Twitter by Stanford law professor Michele Dauber, Dan A. Turner pleads Judge Aaron Persky for leniency, calling jail time a "steep price to pay for 20 minutes of action out of his 20 plus years of life."

He even suggests that his son's actions on the night of the rape were not violent. "What I know as his father is that incarceration is not the appropriate punishment for Brock," he wrote in the letter's conclusion.

Judge Persky's sentence has already been widely criticized for its leniency (prosecutors asked for a sentence of six years, and the maximum for Turner's crimes is 14 years). 

"I am disappointed with the sentence in this case," Santa Clara County DA Jeff Rosen said in a statement. "This predatory offender has failed to take responsibility, failed to show remorse, and failed to tell the truth."

In one of the letter's most puzzling passages, the elder Turner writes that his son has been "deeply altered forever" by these events. What he overlooks, of course, are the lifelong effects of his son's actions on his 23-year-old victim. The powerful statement she made in court is proof that - to say the very least - her life has been deeply altered, too.  

"You took away my worth, my privacy, my energy, my time, my safety, my intimacy, my confidence, my own voice, until today," she said. " I am not just a drunk victim... I am a human being who has been irreversibly hurt."

Read Dan A. Turner's entire letter right here.