Nope, you're definitely not the only one. Somehow people managed, and still manage, to justify this to system themselves, and I think every step along the path to insanity seemed to make sense at the time. To think I didn't even mention civil asset forfeiture (we're not as big on property rights as it seems), or the fact that drug violations exclude people from federal student aid without which attending college is virtually impossible, or the way minor violations to poor people who can't pay them result in them cycling into and out of jail with the resulting fine increasing at each step, and so on and so forth.
Now in this particular case, the two-tiered nature of the "justice" system is really obvious, hence the outcry. A defendant who is poor enough to not be able to afford a lawyer will have a public defender, who is usually operating on a shoestring budget and with such a large caseload that he or she can spend only a matter of minutes looking at the case. The result is that the defendant would be pressured into taking a plea bargain, which well over 90% of them do. Were the defendant foolish enough to go to trial, the trial would be very lopsided and he'd probably get the maximum sentence or close to it.
But if the defendant is a rich kid at Stanford, he can call Daddy, who will hire a high-powered criminal defense lawyer who will get the trial dragged out as long as possible, in order to dissect every trivial detail of the case in order to make the victim seem less reliable. This would normally result in the victim dropping the case in order to stop being revictimized and move on with her life. What was highly unusual about this case is that the victim actually held on and kept fighting, and that the case was solid enough that not even an expensive legal team could cause it to fall apart at trial. Brock Turner got unlucky - most rape victims can't even bring themselves to charge the rapist, let alone hold on against a sustained legal onslaught for well over a year, and much less write an eloquent statement detailing exactly what happened and what the experience looks like from the victim's perspective.
Of course the defense lawyer was still able to spin the "good kid who made a mistake" angle well enough to get the judge to give Turner a rather lenient sentence. Still, if we were to somehow get a random sample of 1000 rapes by defendants rich enough to hire a good lawyer, this would turn out to easily be in the top 5% in terms of legal consequences for the rapist. Turner's assumption that he would get away with the rape was totally justified. He just happened to rape a particularly strong-willed woman and get caught in the act; he'd have gotten away scot-free if it hadn't been for both of those factors.
) that too often leads to drunkenness and sex: it was. So I'm not shocked at a relatively light sentence. What shocks me are the heavy sentences routinely handed down for this kind of thing. Draconian punishments do not produce better outcomes, they may even makes things worse.
