On January 28, 2015, Brock Turner, a Stanford student athlete, sexually assaulted Chanel Miller, a visiting student. (Miller has expressed a preference not to remain anonymous.) Turner was arrested, and five days later, indicted on two counts of rape, two felony sexual assault counts, and one attempted rape count. In March of 2016, he was convicted on the sexual assault and attempted rape charges.
Turner faced a maximum sentence of 14 years for these convictions, but on June 2, 2016, the presiding judge, Aaron Persky, sentenced him to just six months in prison and three months’ probation. The lenient sentence made national headlines owing to Miller’s wrenching impact statement and sparked widespread outrage and condemnation. Several days later, on June 6, a Stanford Law School professor announced the formation of a committee and began collecting signatures to recall Persky. According to journalistic sources, the committee raised more than a million dollars for the recall effort, and the voters ultimately recalled Persky in June of 2018.
While the leniency of Persky’s sentence was widely condemned, a host of critics, including law professors, judges, public defenders, and elected officials, denounced the recall effort. They did so not because they felt Persky’s sentence of Turner was appropriate, but rather because they believed the recall itself — or, more accurately, the recall *campaign* and the fear it might induce in *other judges* — might have pernicious effects on the administration of criminal justice.
Specifically, these critics worried that the fear the campaign would induce would lead judges to become more severe in their sentencing behavior. (As has been exhaustively documented elsewhere, the punitiveness of judges affects not just the sentences imposed following guilty trial verdicts, but also those arrived at via plea bargaining.) And importantly, the defendants most likely to bear the brunt of this increase in sentencing severity wouldn’t be affluent white Stanford students accused of sexual assault, but the broader population of criminal defendants in California courts, which is, of course, disproportionately composed of defendants of color.
In other words, critics of the recall predicted that even if Persky himself deserved sanction, the effort to punish him would inflict significant collateral damage on a vulnerable population.
Our paper, “Incentive Effects of Recall Elections: Evidence from Criminal Sentencing in California Courts,” evaluates this prediction empirically, using disposition data from six California counties. Our main approach is regression discontinuity in time (RDiT), and we look for discontinuous increases in sentences in the immediate aftermath of the petition announcement and the recall itself. Several sets of findings emerge: