Father of convicted rapist says son shouldn't be punished for '20 minutes of action'

The father of a former Stanford University swimmer convicted of raping a woman at a fraternity party has defended his son's crime, saying the six-month jail term is too harsh.

Brock Turner was sentenced to serve to six months in jail and three years' probation after the woman who was assaulted read the court an emotional statement that has gone viral.

The 20-year-old must also complete a sex offender management program and register as a convicted sex offender for the rest of his life.

A jury in March found Turner guilty of three felony sexual assault counts for the January 2015 attack, where two graduate students saw him raping the unconscious 22-year-old woman behind a rubbish bin.

Turner tried to flee, but the students tackled and pinned him down until police arrived and arrested him.

While the six-month penalty has been slammed for being a 'slap on the wrist', Turner's father Dan Turner has released a statement saying the punishment was "a steep price to pay for 20 minutes of action".

In the statement, he said his son's life has been "deeply altered" by the events of last January and he will never be the same again.

"He will never be his happy go lucky self with that easy going personality and welcoming smile. His every waking minute is consumed with worry, anxiety, fear and depression.

He said Turner has lost his appetite and now only eats to survive.

"These verdicts have broken and shattered him and our family in so many ways. His life will never be the one that he dreamt about and worked so hard to achieve.

"What I know as his father is that incarceration is not the appropriate punishment for Brock. He has no prior criminal history and has never been violent to anyone including his actions on the night of January 17th 2015," he wrote.

"Probation is the best answer for Brock in this situation."

The woman at the centre of the attack, who has remained unidentified, read out a victim impact statement in court on Thursday in front of her attacker.

In her statement, she described how the attack left her emotionally scarred.

"My independence, natural joy, gentleness, and steady lifestyle I had been enjoying became distorted beyond recognition. I became closed off, angry, self-deprecating, tired, irritable, empty," she said.

District Attorney Jeff Rosen said he was disappointment that the judge did not sentence Turner to prison.

"The punishment does not fit the crime," Rosen said in a statement after the sentence was announced Thursday. "The sentence does not factor in the true seriousness of this sexual assault, or the victim's ongoing trauma. Campus rape is no different than off-campus rape. Rape is rape."

Turner had a blood-alcohol level that was twice the legal limit, the San Jose Mercury News reported (http://bayareane.ws/1UoYhNk). The three-time All American high school swimmer from Dayton, Ohio, withdrew from Stanford after his arrest.

The San Jose Mercury News did not identify the woman. The Associated Press does not generally identify victims of sexual abuse.

The woman, who was not a student, told investigators she drank about four shot glasses of whisky before going to the fraternity party, and then drank vodka there.

The next thing she said she remembered was waking up at a hospital in San Jose, where a deputy told her she may have been a victim of sexual assault.

"I stood there examining my body beneath the stream of water and decided, I don't want my body anymore. I was terrified of it," the woman wrote in a letter to Turner and Judge Persky that she read in the courtroom during the sentencing.

"I wanted to take off my body like a jacket and leave it at the hospital with everything else."

In an editorial, the San Jose Mercury News called the six-month county jail sentence "a slap on the wrist."

"Brock Turner's six-month jail term for sexual assault of an intoxicated, unconscious woman on the Stanford campus last year is a setback for the movement to take campus rape seriously," the newspaper said.

"If Turner's slap on the wrist sentence is a setback, activists can take some comfort that the jurors at the trial in March saw what happened as a very serious crime."

News break – June 7