Yet another great post by Shavar Jeffries at Black Professors blog:
Ultimately, I find the entire Vick episode to be a comedy of the absurd. At the end of the day, he bet on dogfights, and subsidized an enterprise that sometimes wantonly killed dogs who weren’t top fighters. As a consequence, he’s already lost millions in endorsements and has suffered incalculable damage to his reputation. The federal court is now considering a term of up to five years; and the NFL apparently a ban of an additional year on top of his prison sentence. In my view, anything beyond six months imprisonment would be outrageous; and any suspension by the NFL beyond the several games players routinely get for violence against women or drug abuse would be equally unjustifiable. If Vick had bet on bird fights, he apparently couldn’t be prosecuted at all in many states. Severe harms are perpetrated against human beings on a daily basis with nothing remotely resembling the witch-burning Michael Vick is experiencing.
I don’t agree with everything he wrote - I don’t think it’s because of race as much as cultural differences (sport hunting vs dog fighting, for example), though race is certainly a factor - but he does hit on an important point.
The full post can be found here.
I know I’m a little late in leaving a comment on this post, but better late than never… there were a couple of issues I had with Shavar’s interpretation, but in I’ll just make this one point:
Shavar thinks anything over 6 months would be outrageous, but Vick and his attorney’s actually agreed to plead guilty with the understanding that the prosecutors would recommend a 12 to 18 month sentence… so I guess it should be an outrage to Shavar that Mike Vick actually thinks 12 months would be reasonable.
Vicks lawyers are trying to get him the best deal possible. By them agreeing to a plea deal of 12 to 18 months says more about what the prosecution wanted to give him that about Vicks lawyers, IMHO.