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A recent public letter recounting the author's harrowing experience after being raped by a Stanford University student has caused an uproar against white privilege in the United States and prompted compassionate replies by people from different backgrounds.
In the 12-page letter, the 23-year-old rape victim, under the pseudonym of Emily Doe, revisits her assault in January 2015 on the campus of Stanford University and tells of its destructive impact on her life and why she came forward to confront her attacker.
Brock Turner, the Stanford student and star swimmer who was found guilty of three felony charges in the case, faces only a light sentence of six months in jail, while minimum sentence for such crimes should be no less than two years in jail under California law.
The letter, which was read out in court hearing as the woman's personal statement, said that Turner "took away my worth, my privacy, my energy, my time, my intimacy, my confidence, my own voice, until today."
Many have expressed doubts that the obvious too lenient sentence for Turner is due to the fact that he is from a well-off white family.
In handling criminal cases, U.S. judges could adjust the length of prison sentences based on the convict's social standing, race and talents, among other factors, said Danial H. Deng, a well-known Chinese-American lawyer based in Los Angeles.
The Turner case exposed two loopholes in the U.S. judicial system, said Deng. One is that although it is up to the jury to decide if the accused is guilty or not, the judge has "a large room" in deciding on the length of the sentence, and the other is that wealth could easily play a role in the process since the richer ones always have a better legal defense team than the poorer ones, he explained.
Various efforts seeking to remove the judge in the assault case have been underway.
On Friday, a petition with more than one million signatures calling for Judge Aaron Persky's removal was delivered to the state's judicial commission, and the online campaign for the same purpose is also gaining momentum.
The latest entries of the twitter account of #RecallPersky include expression of support by groups and individuals, and also responses to the Emily Doe letter, such as an open letter by U.S. Vice President Joe Biden.
Titled "An Open Letter to A Courageous Young Woman," the article signed by Biden said, "I am in awe of your courage for speaking out -- for so clearly naming the wrongs that were done to you and so passionately asserting your equal claim to human dignity."
"And I am filled with furious anger -- both that this happened to you and that our culture is still so broken that you were ever put in the position of defending your own worth," Biden wrote.
"You were failed by a culture on our college campuses where one in five women is sexually assaulted ... and the statistics on college sexual assault haven't gone down in the past two decades," the U.S. leader said, adding that "it's obscene, and it's a failure that lies at all out feet."
(APD)
