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California voters removed Aaron Persky, the judge who gave Brock Turner a six-month sexual assault sentence in the Stanford University rape case that made headlines in 2016. Turner, a Stanford swimmer, was accused of sexually assaulting an unconscious woman while at school. A jury convicted him on all three charges — sexual penetration with a foreign object of an intoxicated person, sexual penetration with a foreign object of an unconscious person and intent to commit rape — and Persky sentenced Turner to six months in jail with three years probation. The maximum jail sentence for sexual assault in the state of California is 14 years. People across the country were outraged by the sentencing, which the judge explained by saying he felt Turner would "not be a danger to others” and he was concerned that “a prison sentence would have a severe impact” on him. Turner's victim, a woman who went by the name Emily Doe, wrote a nearly 7,000-word letter about her experience that she shared in the courtroom. When Persky handed down his sentence, he made no comments about the victim. Talk of a recall began almost immediately after Persky sentenced Turner. Earlier this year, the Santa Clara County registrar announced that supporters of the recall effort had enough signatures to get the question on Tuesday's ballot. “As a judge, my role is to consider both sides,” Persky said in the statement filed with the county registrar. “It’s not always popular, but it’s the law, and I took an oath to follow it without regard to public opinion or my opinions as a former prosecutor.”After Turner's sentencing and the controversy that followed, California enacted mandatory minimum sentences for sexual assault cases and closed a loophole in the law that allowed sexual assault to be punished less severely if the victim was drunk. A California judge has not been recalled in more than 80 years.