I marked "like" as in "agree", though the insight is horrible. - I see multiple levels in "they". At a high level of abstraction, yes, Judge Aaron Persky let Brock Turner sexually Chanel Miller (in the "Stanford swimmer" case), by giving Turner such a light sentence afterwards...

...effectively over-ruling the two guys on bicycles who, then and there, saw what Turner was doing to Miller, and stopped him. (The two guys were Peter Jonsson and Carl-Fredrik Arndt; they were grad students from Sweden; current POTUS would probably deport them.)