Brock Turner raped a woman behind a dumpster at a party in Palo Alto on the night of January 20 2015. He was caught in the act by two graduate students, and despite his very expensive celebrity lawyers working overtime to demonize the unconscious survivor he was convicted. He relied on his good name and status as an athlete attending Stanford as proof of his goodness. The judge, a Stanford Alumni, felt sorry for him and gave him a six month sentence in the county jail with three months suspended when he faced 14 years. Throughout the process, Brock Turner lied, his family lied, his lawyers knew, the court should have known and nobody said a word. Lying under oath is a crime called perjury. Brock Turner did it and the proof is in black and white.
Brock Turner's address in court documents is listed as the family home at 230 Volusia Avenue in the Oakwood neighborhood of Dayton Ohio. Brock Turner did not live there when he was arrested. The family sold that home 2013, more than 18 months before his arrest and before he received his scholarship to Stanford. The family purchased a new home in the Dayton suburb of Belbrook, which is in neighboring Greene County. County Auditor's and County Recorder's records in both counties confirm these facts.
Between 1/20/2015 when he was arrested and 2/2/2015 when he was formally charged, Brock Turner was granted bail and it was paid. There is a brief investigation before bail is granted to give the judge information so the judge can decide on a bail amount. Information given by a defendant during this process is information that is given to the court. It is testimony. Lying during testimony is perjury. Brock Turner perjured himself before the trial had even begun.
Lawyers got hired. The lawyers, being expensive, know where to send a bill. They could not have been sending the bill to 230 Volusia Avenue. Nor could they have been sending relevant court documents to that address. That address was not on the checks they presumably received. The address they would have been corresponding with would have been 1232 Ravelle Court in Bellbrook. It is not possible for legal firms of that caliber to not know their client's actual address.
A Lawyer is an officer of the court. They are not allowed to lie to the court. They are not allowed to knowingly permit their client to lie to the court. They are required to report false testimony. Anything else is a crime called suborning perjury. It appears as though Brock Turner's lawyers, being fully aware of where to both correspond with and bill his daddy, knew that the address on the court paperwork was false. Yet as of the time of his indictment, they failed to correct it.
Brock's Daddy was obviously privy to this incorrect information. He failed to correct it or demand that his son be honest about the basics, such as his address. Honesty is key this case because Brock's defense rested on the fact that his victim was unconscious and therefore could not be raped. Defending his son in a letter for a reduced sentence, Daddy Dan Turner argued that his son had a diminshed capacity because he was drunk at the time. Dan Turner was not dunk for the 17 months between his son's arrest and conviction. Had he been too drunk to notice his sons obvious lies he would have lost his job as a civilian contractor for the Air Force at Wright Patterson Air Force Base. He supported his son all the way saying he should not have been convicted over “20 minutes of action.” Time will tell if Dan Turner suffers because of 17 months of provable inaction.
Arguments will be made that this is not perjury, but simply a “clerical error.” That error would require clerks at the court, the defendant's law firm, the Palo Alto police department and the Santa Clara County Sheriff's department (they serve subpoenas) to all be incompetent on the same case at the same time. This seems unlikely. The Mockingbird will keep an eye on this and see which of the allegedly incompetent parties corrects this error first.
The judge showed great sympathy for the promising young scion of the military industrial complex. He was not alone. Dr. Dean Olsen, Director of the Aerospace Medicine Program at Wright State and family friend of the Turners wrote a letter stating in part "My greatest concern is that incarceration would damage a young man who I am quite certain is fragile, who, in my professional opinion, had and currently has no intent of harming anyone, and would result in a person who very likely ends up malignantly hardened toward society." The ties between Wright State and Armstrong Aeromedical Laboratory at Wright Patterson Air Force base are tight and long standing. One might wonder if a young man who is a perjurer and a rapist might already be hardened toward civilian society if they can commit such crimes with near impunity.
Brock also got a letter of support from a former federal prosecutor. Her name is Margaret M. Quinn. She is currently a municipal judge in Brock's native Oakwood. She stated “I know Brock did not go to that party intending to hurt, or entice, or overpower anyone.” She was not there. She could not know. She is not a telepath, she could not know his intentions. She could have known about his perjury, and as a sitting judge should not have condoned it, yet she defended him all the same.
The lightness of the sentence, and society's reaction to it, are a major section of the nation's news feed currently. Time will tell if real facts will harden civil society toward the Turner family and the military and law enforcement institutions that defend their crimes against us all.
[Mockingbird Researcher Jennifer Connolly contributed to this article ]