Strange Fruit #175: What The Brock Turner Case Says About Race & Justice

New information continues to surface about the Stanford rape case. The latest news is that Brock Turner, who was caught raping an unconscious woman behind a dumpster, will serve only 3 months of his 6 month sentence — a sentence already surprisingly short, given that he was convicted of three felony counts of sexual assault. New York Daily News's Senior Justice Writer Shaun King wrote a piece contrasting Turner's outcome with the sentence handed down to Corey Batey, a Vanderbilt student who raped an unconscious woman in a dorm room. The similarities are striking: Both were star athletes on campus, both were 19 years old, both had ample evidence against them, and both were convicted on three felony counts. But there are two big differences: Batey is black. Turner is white. And Batey is serving a mandatory minimum sentence of 15 to 25 years in prison, while Turner is scheduled to be released before the pools close at the end of this summer. King joins us this week to talk about the case, and Turner's short sentence. "All of us know, and some of us have family and friends, who've served devastating hard time for doing far less than this young man," King says. "He was given breaks that black folks never get. And it's desicable." Research consistently show that black defendants tend to get longer sentences than white defendants, even for the same offenses. A 2014 study by the ACLU found the disparity around 20% — in the federal system, black males tended to receive, on average, a 20% longer sentence than white males for the same crimes. "In this case between Batey and turner, you're talking about a 3000% difference," King says. We spend this episode talking about the different ways the criminal justice system treats people according to race — including incidents where black people have died in police custody or while being arrested. And we explore how efforts to bring more equality to the justice system, like Louisville Judge Olu Stevens' attempts at bringing diversity to the jury box, have been met with resistance.