Aaron Persky

Michael Aaron Persky (born 1962) is an American attorney and former judge of the Santa Clara County Superior Court from 2003 to 2018.

Michael Aaron Persky was born in 1962.

His father, Murray Persky, was a psychiatrist.

His mother, Susan Elder, was a French teacher.

His paternal grandparents owned a poultry business.

He grew up in San Francisco, California.

Persky graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Stanford University in 1984 with a bachelor's degree in international relations.

He was the captain of the Stanford men's lacrosse team, a club sport.

He received a master's degree in international policy studies from Stanford in 1985.

He graduated from the UC Berkeley School of Law (Boalt Hall) in 1990 and was admitted to the bar in California in the same year.

After college, he played for the Berkeley club lacrosse team, for which he was also a captain.

Persky worked for the law firm of Morrison & Foerster, practicing corporate civil litigation.

While in private practice, he received the California Association of Human Relations Organizations' Civil Rights Leadership Award for work on hate crimes, and the State Bar of California's Wiley Manuel Pro Bono Award for his pro bono work for the poor.

In 1997, Persky joined the Santa Clara District Attorney's Office.

In this position, he prosecuted criminal offenses which included violent sex crimes and hate crimes.

He served on the executive committee of the Support Network for Battered Women and the Santa Clara County Network for a Hate-Free Community.

In 2002, Persky unsuccessfully ran for a seat on the Superior Court of California in Santa Clara County, losing to Ron Del Pozzo, who was also a deputy DA.

Persky received 102,801 votes (47.9%), to Del Pozzo's 111,679 votes (52.1%) for Seat 16 on the court.

In his 2002 run, Persky was endorsed by the Santa Clara County Bar Association (and its Women Lawyers Committee) and by the San Jose Mercury News, while Del Pozzo received the endorsement of Sheriff Laurie Smith, U.S. Representatives Zoe Lofgren and Mike Honda, and the AFL–CIO.

Both candidates ran a positive race.

Persky received an appointment to the court from California Governor Gray Davis the following year.

He is the former Chair of the Court's Community Outreach Committee.

By 2003, Persky was a deputy district attorney in the Santa Clara District Attorney's Office and prosecuted juvenile offenders; he was also a member of the DA's Juvenile Wards Team.

Following the controversy, the Associated Press analyzed 20 cases where Persky had passed sentences since January 2015 and found that Persky had followed the sentencing recommendation of the probation department every time.

Some legal experts viewed the sentence in the case as unusually light.

One juror in the Turner case wrote to Persky that his sentence was "ridiculously lenient" and made a "mockery" of the entire trial.

Danny Cevallos, a Pennsylvania-based criminal defense lawyer and CNN legal analyst, said that while the sentence was lenient, Turner's prior clean record made him a candidate for minimum sentencing.

In 2016, Persky gained attention after his ruling in the case People v. Turner, in which he sentenced Stanford University student Brock Turner to six months in jail for the sexual assault and attempted rape of an unconscious 22-year-old woman, Chanel Miller, using the sentence recommended by the Santa Clara County Probation Department.

The sentence led to public outrage and was criticized by prosecutors and victims' rights advocates as being influenced by race, gender, and class bias.

However, the California Commission on Judicial Performance found that there was not clear and convincing evidence of wrongdoing in their investigation of the case.

In June 2016, Persky was elected without opposition for another six-year term on the bench.

The vast majority of Santa Clara County judges—25 in total—ran unopposed in 2016.

In 2016, Persky received international media attention and widespread criticism for sentencing Brock Allen Turner, a 20-year-old Stanford student convicted of three felony counts of sexual assault, to six months in jail and three years of probation.

The statutory maximum sentence was fourteen years; prosecutors sought a six-year term, while the Santa Clara County Probation Department, in its presentence investigation report, recommended a six-month term in county jail, and the defense asked for a four-month term in county jail.

During sentencing, Persky said he considered the factors noted by the Probation Office and the "severe impact" of imprisonment on the defendant's life.

On December 19, 2016, the California Commission on Judicial Performance cleared Persky of any judicial wrongdoing in the Turner sentence.

Nonetheless, Persky was recalled by voters on June 5, 2018, during the 2018 California primary elections, becoming the first judge in California to be recalled in over 80 years.

Prior to joining the bench, he practiced civil litigation for five years and was a prosecutor in Santa Clara County for six years.

Although he did not face any opposition in an election held five days after the sentencing, Persky lost his seat in a June 5, 2018, recall election.

He also briefly coached girls' tennis at Lynbrook High School in the fall of 2019.