Far more qualified writers than myself have already dissected the Donte Stallworth verdict in great detail, so I will not do that here. And by “qualified” I mean that someone is paying them for their thoughts, not that they are some great talent or something. I know how self-serving that sounds, but I have recently gone around and around with a couple of writers on popular sports web sites, and you could tell it was their assumption going in that as a blogger I could not possibly have their writing ability. Suffice it to say that if being a junior staff writer at ESPN.com paid enough money, I would be pursuing that option. I am constantly reminded of the relative superiority of my writing skills and intellect when I read any piece by any sportswriter not named Rick Riley…and I do mean “any”. Sure, my writing ability might appear as remedial as most of the other guys out there if I had deadlines and was expected to churn out content at a far more frequent rate than I am required to do now. Anyway, back to the point of this article.
I had an idea of taking a slightly different look at the Donte Stallworth case. I am going to offer a simple bottom-line comparison of the legal cases of 3 NFL players that have made a habit of being despicable criminals when they are off the field: Leonard Little, Michael Vick and Donte Stallworth. Sure, there is a literal cast of thousands when you want to look at career criminals that are currently masquerading as professional athletes, but these 3 offer a telling comparison and indictment of our highly flawed legal system. Every legal case is different, but let’s quickly examine the single best point of comparison for the “let the punishment fit the crime” argument – what’dya get?
1. Leonard Little made a conscious decision to drive his car in an altered state. He decided that his having a good time was more important than the safety of the people he would be sharing the road with. He was not up to the relatively simple task of not careening into another vehicle and killed someone. He received a sentence of 90 days.
2. Donte Stallworth did the same thing as Leonard Little, except he hit some dude walking across the road and killed him. Stallworth received a sentence of 30 days.
3. Michael Vick was one of the key members of a dog fighting ring. In that position, he supposedly ordered the killing of underperforming dogs. Vick received a sentence of 23 months, at the hands of a judge who exceeded the 12- to 18-month sentence recommended by the prosecution.
OK – I might not be the smartest guy around, but if you do some simple math here, you could draw the conclusion that a professional athlete could drive drunk and kill someone and expect an average sentence of 2 months…whereas if you killed a couple of dogs and otherwise pissed off the ASPCA, you can expect a sentence 12 times longer. Let’s extend the argument out to the ridiculous, since that is the best way to assess this particular glitch in our legal system…to keep the math simple, let’s say the Vick was responsible for ordering the “murders” of 10 dogs…that is an average sentence of 2.3 months, or 70 days, per dog. Little and Stallworth averaged 60 days per human being killed.
How confident should we feel in a legal system where this is possible?
Of course, there are other factors at play here. I will give an opinion or two at the end, but here is a short list of other things to consider when looking at this:
1. All 3 of these guys could afford the best lawyers that money can buy.
2. All 3 of these guys are rock freaking stupid to do any of this with so much to lose. A lot of people would argue that the actions of Vick are exponentially more stupid than what Little and Stallworth did, and I tend to agree. The guy decided that a good investment for an NFL player was a dog fighting venture…and not only bankrolling it, but taking that stupidity to a whole different level by being a very public representative, attending events and letting it be known throughout the entire sordid industry that he was operating at a very high level. Then, when things started to get dicey, and the Feds were getting involved, he was not entirely truthful. Why do athletes keep making this mistake? Don’t they know that the only thing they could ever pin on Al Capone was income tax evasion?
3. Little and Stallworth should not get off quite so easily with regard to the stupidity argument. I do not have any statistics readily available about drunk drivers, and certainly do not have the inclination to look something up, but that has never prevented me from spouting off before. Besides, any such statistics would be dependent on the self-admission of people that got caught, so they would be essentially unreliable. But, I would hazard a guess and say that of all the people caught drunk driving, for whatever reason, it is a miniscule percentage of offenders that are embarking on their first substance-impaired voyage behind the wheel. In fact, I would bet that the percentage is still miniscule when you make it a requirement that the person caught has to have driven drunk less than 100 times in their life. Suffice it to say that Little and/or Stallworth very well may have been the exception, but it would not be unreasonable to guess that they had each driven drunk 100+ times before their luck ran out and their repetitive stupidity was exposed.
4. Michael Vick once tried to board a plane with a bag of marijuana (illegal to take on the flight) by hiding it in a partially full bottle of water (which is, in this nice little world we live in right now, just as illegal in the eyes of the knee-jerk mental giants that make those kind of rules and regulations under the assumption that everyone is as intellectually bankrupt as themselves). If that doesn’t tell you everything you need to know about the smarts of Michael Vick, then I don’t know what does.
So, there are a ton of other things I could mention, but I honestly think you can probably attribute a large portion of this to the fact that these guys are just plain stupid…but they all have enough cash to get the celebrity treatment in court. Sure, it is probably a little jacked up that Vick got more time for killing some dogs than Little and Stallworth got for killing humans, but do you think a regular guy facing the charges Vick was facing would have gotten a sentence of 23 months or something far greater?
A couple of other points I feel I have to make here. I honestly believe that Michael Vick exacerbated his problems by hiring Billy Martin as his lawyer. At first blush, it looked like smart move going for a guy like Martin, but when you look closer, Vick basically told the judge that he had no problem making the trial into the biggest circus possible. The fact that Martin, although I am sure he is a fine lawyer, completely botched the case, might have something to do with my feelings. Well, I guess you can’t really say that he botched the case, since a “guilty” verdict was a guarantee…but during sentencing, the judge specifically mentioned that he did not feel as if Vick truly understood the gravity of his situation or was fully repentant for his illegal actions. The fact that the judge was allowed to feel that way is a failure on the part of Martin and his team…a COLLOSSAL failure. Faced with a 100% chance of a guilty verdict, their only job was to minimize the damage, in terms of sentencing, and the only way to do that was to build a perception of Vick as a repentant guy that took full responsibility for his actions and who was not only sorry that he got caught but sorry that he actually did the things he did.
Sure, hindsight is 20/20, but there have been lots and lots of high profile cases (O.J. “The Ripper” Simpson notwithstanding) where celebrities and athletes have actually gotten screwed by picking high-profile lawyers that seem to be relying, at least in part, on their past successes and reputation to win the day, often as a substitute for hunger and hard work. If I ever get in trouble, I am calling my cousin Vinny.
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Dear Mr. Bowlen:
