A jury in March convicted Turner, 20, of sexually assaulting an unconscious, intoxicated woman outside a Stanford University fraternity party last year, in a case that has drawn international attention to the culture of sexual violence on campus. Brock Turner and his father Dan Turner in court. Dan Turner offered supportive character testimony. The documents also contained the account of a witness who claimed he saw "a female subject lying on the ground behind the dumpster… [and] a male subject standing over her with a cell phone." "The cell phone had a bright light pointed in the direction of the female, using either a flashlight app in his phone or its built in flash," the statement reads. Two students who happened upon the scene said the woman, now 23, appeared unconscious and held Turner for police.

GroupMe allows any member of a group to delete an image, the Daily Telegraph reports. Stanford law professor Michele Dauber speaks at a rally before activists delivered over one million signatures calling for the removal of Judge Aaron Persky from the bench. Credit:AP The revelations come as efforts gather to unseat the judge who sentenced Brock to a mere six months in county jail gather steam. Activists handed a judicial commission a million signatures on Friday calling for the ouster of a Santa Clara County judge. "This really speaks out to a groundswell of outrage in the community," said Paul Hogarth, campaign director for Daily Kos. "We do a lot of online petitions on a myriad political progressive causes, and have never come close to getting 1 million signatures on anything." Activists from UltraViolet, a national women's advocacy organization, attempt to deliver over one million signatures to the California Commission on Judicial Performance calling for the removal of Judge Aaron Persky. Credit:AP

The delivery of the signatures was only the highest profile development on a day when furor continued to grow over what has quickly become an internationally symbolic cause in the fight against "rape culture." But there was also support for Judge Aaron Persky: The county bar association put out a statement decrying efforts to oust the judge as an assault on judicial independence. And court officials, besieged with demands for documents in the case, took the unusual step of emailing copies of the entire 471-page file to news organizations - at 2 a.m. Persky has declined to comment, noting the case remains active as Turner has appealed his conviction. Brock Turner in his January 2015 booking photo, released by the Santa Clara County Sheriff's Office. Despite an impassioned 12-page letter to the judge from the victim and prosecutors' demand that Turner serve six years in prison, Persky sided with probation officers' recommendation and sentenced Turner to six months in the county jail, along with a lifetime requirement to register as a sex offender. Persky cited Turner's youth, lack of criminal record and intoxicated state as reasons for the sentence, which fell below the so-called mandatory minimum for the crime. But the victim's letter, which prosecutors released after the sentence, quickly went viral online and galvanised outrage over the decision.

Santa Clara County Superior Court Judge Aaron Persky,. Credit:AP On Friday in California, three rape survivors spoke at the signature delivery event in front of the Commission on Judicial Performance in San Francisco. One, a young man who declined to give a last name, said he was raped by two men after meeting one during a night of drinking. "Brock's victim and I, and other survivors, shouldn't have to take this emotional beating by the system," he said. While organizers acknowledged the petition was largely symbolic and a physical manifestation of online "clicktivism" - delivered via a flashdrive in one of three largely empty boxes used as visual props - they said the wrath generated by the sentence was unprecedented. By Friday, 16 California lawmakers had sent letters to the judicial commission asking for a review of Persky's conduct and to Santa Clara District Attorney Jeff Rosen urging him to seek a higher court review of Turner's sentence.

The District Attorney's Office has said there is no legal grounds to challenge Turner's sentence. "The bottom line is that in this instance we believe that Judge Persky applied the right laws and reviewed the right circumstances and factors that he was required to review," said assistant District Attorney James Gibbons-Shapiro. "We believe that he made the wrong decision, ... that he should have sentenced Turner to prison. We don't believe that we have a basis to appeal or seek a writ in this case, though, because his decision was authorised by law and was made by applying the correct standards." But that's not the only avenue activists have taken against Persky. Stanford law professor Michele Dauber, a family friend of the victim who also spoke at Friday's petition delivery, is leading an effort that would allow Santa Clara County voters to recall Persky. Three top political advisers - John Shallman, Joe Trippi and Paul Maslin - have joined the recall effort, it was announced Friday, which will require about 60,000 signatures of registered Santa Clara County voters to reach the ballot. "People are angry, and this is a way for them to address this," she said after the event. "I am 100 per cent confident that we will win this."

But others, especially in the legal profession, have balked at the attacks on Persky. The Santa Clara County Bar Association sent a statement on Friday condemning the efforts to oust Persky as an attack on judicial independence, arguing there's no "credible assertions" that the judge "violated the law or his ethical obligations or acted in bad faith." The bar added that it is unaware of any other "allegations of impropriety against Judge Persky during his 13 years on the bench." Rosen has said that "while I strongly disagree with the sentence that Judge Persky issued in the Brock Turner case I do not believe he should be removed from his judgeship." And the county's public defender, Molly O'Neal, called the sentence "totally fair, not out of line, given his lack of a criminal record," and added that she stood behind Persky because "the judge listened to everyone involved and made a difficult call." But others in the legal world disagreed, including Oakland attorney Carla Minnard. "Although I would normally say that a judge should not be recalled absent some pattern or recurring behavior," Minnard wrote in a letter to the Santa Clara County bar, "when the decision-making is so out of bounds and so egregious (as I believe it was here), then even a single instance warrants his removal from the bench."