Michael Vick, who pleaded guilty to dogfighting charges, is now suspended from the National Football League indefinitely and will likely face a 12- to 18-month prison sentence. Clearly, Vick’s actions were wrong, and he will get the federal punishment he deserves. But, outside of that, it seems clear that the media turned this into a two-month frenzy when most of the evidence had already come out by July 17, the day Vick and three other men were indicted by a federal grand jury for felony and misdemeanor charges involving a six-year interstate dog fighting venture called “Bad Newz Kennels.”
It is equally clear that the NFL doles out punishment based on the players themselves, not the crime in question.
On Feb. 19, a few months before Vick was indicted, Adam “Pacman” Jones of the Tennessee Titans was part of a strip club melee and triple shooting incident. This marked Jones’ fifth arrest since being drafted by the Titans in 2005.
In the strip club incident, Jones was said to have slammed a stripper’s face into the dance floor and threatened a security guard’s life. One of the men from his group shot three people, paralyzing a security guard from the waist down.
While Jones received a one-year suspension from the NFL and no jail time, Vick, a first time offender of the NFL’s Personal Conduct Policy, has been suspended indefinitely and will see jail time. Though some of this has to do with lack of evidence in the Jones case, it remains to be seen why Vick received such a harsh sentence compared to Jones – outside of the fact that he’s a superstar athlete whose case was the media’s main target for the better part of the summer of 2007.
Another example involves St. Louis Rams defensive end Leonard Little. In October of his rookie season in 1998, Little got in his Lincoln Navigator with a blood alcohol level of 0.19 percent, blew through a red light and crashed into and killed another motorist, Susan Gutweiler. He received 90 days in jail, four years of probation and a thousand hours of community service. Little was back on the field the following season. I can only assume that media hype and the star power of Vick added to the sentence he has received.
To say what Vick has done isn’t wrong would be absolutely ridiculous – it’s wrong in every sense of the word. But to see one player charged with involuntary manslaughter and another who has broken the NFL personal conduct policy five separate occasions and involved in a shooting both receive a somewhat significantly lighter treatment than Vick is not okay. I don’t know if this is a problem with our judicial system, the NFL or both, but it needs to be looked into. Just because Vick is Vick shouldn’t warrant him harsher punishment than a lesser-known player. Everyone should be punished based on their actions alone, not who they are.
