I have no idea about this case, but there’s a big difference between restorative (which is tentatively being trialed in many places) and a more traditional retributive justice system.
The first seeks the victims input and attempts to compensate the community effected. Retributive justice uses a more nebusous sense of what’s right/deserved and what’s wrong/unjust.
Pros and cons to both approaches. It’s still debatable which one is better at rehabilitation. But our current system doesn’t seem to place a high priority on that anyways.
This isn’t a case where a different theory of justice was being experimented with. In this case, the rich white man going to the prestigious, expensive ivy league school was given 6 months for raping an unconscious woman behind a dumpster because, among other reasons, a stiffer sentence would have negatively impacted his career as a competitive swimmer. The judge who sentenced Turner to only 6 months for raping an unconscious woman behind a dumpster had also presided over a case where an underage girl was gang-raped, also while unconscious. He allowed to be entered into evidence photos of her at a party a year after she was raped as evidence that she did not suffer from PTSD after being gang raped by a baseball team. It’s hard to imagine anything other than that this judge was a proponent of rape and did his best to protect rapists from any sort of punishment at all, but when absolutely forced to render some sort of sentence he punished rapists as little as possible.
I have no idea about this case, but there’s a big difference between restorative (which is tentatively being trialed in many places) and a more traditional retributive justice system.
The first seeks the victims input and attempts to compensate the community effected. Retributive justice uses a more nebusous sense of what’s right/deserved and what’s wrong/unjust.
Pros and cons to both approaches. It’s still debatable which one is better at rehabilitation. But our current system doesn’t seem to place a high priority on that anyways.
This isn’t a case where a different theory of justice was being experimented with. In this case, the rich white man going to the prestigious, expensive ivy league school was given 6 months for raping an unconscious woman behind a dumpster because, among other reasons, a stiffer sentence would have negatively impacted his career as a competitive swimmer. The judge who sentenced Turner to only 6 months for raping an unconscious woman behind a dumpster had also presided over a case where an underage girl was gang-raped, also while unconscious. He allowed to be entered into evidence photos of her at a party a year after she was raped as evidence that she did not suffer from PTSD after being gang raped by a baseball team. It’s hard to imagine anything other than that this judge was a proponent of rape and did his best to protect rapists from any sort of punishment at all, but when absolutely forced to render some sort of sentence he punished rapists as little as possible.