Saturday, October 8, 2011

Athletes Avoiding Arrest: Professionals and Their Puny Punishments

[UNSW, 2010]

Professional athletes, it seems, are consistently finding themselves in the naughty corner. Rest assured, the media is often the culprit cornering them in. Indeed, the month of February 2009 found the media reporting misbehaviour by a professional athlete on at least twenty-two of the twenty-eight days (Kim 2009). 
Athletes often misbehave for the same reasons that other young, non-celebrity people might misbehave; more often than not, alcohol is involved.  Despite being consistently advised on their responsibilities both as role models in their communities and as representative of their designated sport, however, professional athletes both old and young continue to display anti-social behaviour.
“Athletes tend to be more extroverted, assertive and self-confident than non-athletes,” says University of Wollongong Psychology Lecturer Mitch Byrne. “These dispositions are evident early in life and are reinforced by coaches—and often parents—who value these qualities as contributing to their sporting success” (Byrne 2007).
Domestic violence is the leading crime committed by athletes in a number of reports, and the incidences of physical attacks can begin early in an athlete’s career. Even at the collegial level, student-athletes are paving the way for their future as a professional. According to the Benedict-Crosset Study of sexual assaults, student-athletes were found to commit one in three sexual assaults at thirty major Division I universities in the United States (Valen 2009).
It is clear that athletes have been and will continue to behave poorly, and that the media will usually pick up on their transgressions. What is less clear, however, is why the punishments for these professional athletes differ so greatly from the punishments of those in civil life who have committed the same crime.
In the United States, court-ordered community service is often used as an alternative disciplinary action to jail time and other harsher punishments. It is a criminal sentence, mostly used in cases of misdemeanor to punish first-time or non-violent offenses. Defendants are often allowed to choose when, where and how they fulfill their hours of required community service. But community service acts between professional athletes and those in civil life often differ greatly.
In 2006, USA Today investigated forty cases since 2001 in which professional athletes were ordered by a court to complete various amounts of community service. The crimes of these athletes ranged from assaulting fans, police, wives and girlfriends; having sex with minors; driving while intoxicated; possessing illegal drugs; carrying concealed weapons; firing pistols in public and vehicular homicide. For a non-celebrity, the court-ordered community service that would be expected of an offender might involve tasks such as digging ditches, collecting roadside trash, cleaning public parks and other labour-intensive work.
But for 50% of the cases examined, the professional athletes hardly picked up a shovel nor touched a single piece of rubbish. Instead, they fulfilled their community service duties by participating in activities such as throwing a ceremonial first pitch at a Major League Baseball game, coaching at a youth sports camp, collecting tickets, posing for photographs and signing autographs for enthusiastic fans. 
In 30% of the cases, the community service punishment was “unable to be determined,” mostly due to the courts of probation agencies closing or destroying the athlete’s criminal records.
In only 15% of the cases did the professional athletes receive a punishment similar to the kinds of community service projects that civilians would fulfill—such as picking up rubbish on the side of the road. Of the forty cases, only two went to trial. Almost all of the athletes reached plea bargains or were allowed participation in a pretrial diversion program, in which no plea is required and all charges are dismissed once the community service is completed and fines are paid in full.
According to Gordon Bazemore, a professor of criminology at Florida Atlantic University and a nationally recognised expert on community service, “Nobody really takes it seriously. It’s more abused and misused than all the sanctions out there” (McCarthy 2006).
The United States, in particular, has a particular fondness for letting it slide when it comes to punishing their athletes. The media ensures that the public has consistent access to not only all of their athletes’ favourable statistics and number of records broken, but to athletes’ shortcomings and tribulations in their personal lives. As far back as 1995, newspaper articles discussed 350 college and professional athletes who were involved in 252 crimes and faced criminal charges (Duncan 2004, p 28).
But the United States is not alone in allowing athletes to get away with more. In the last decade, for example, five footballers received four-month sentences for using the performance enhancing anabolic steroid nandrolone. Fernando Couto (Portuguese), Jaap Stam (Dutch), Edgar Davids (Dutch), Josep Guardiola (Spanish, who was later cleared of wrongdoing), and Manuele Blasi (Italian) were all found guilty of cheating, and their punishment was a four-month ban on play time. Yet in 2004, when former Juventus midfielder Jonathan Bachini  was caught using cocaine, he was suspended for nine months. Cocaine is a recreational drug—not a performance enhancement—and his cocaine use gave him no unfair advantage over other players; in other words, he was never accused of cheating. Yet he was later banned for life, in 2006, when he tested positive again. It is interesting to note that the steroid-using athletes were let off with four-month sentences, while the recreational-using athlete lost his entire career (Garganese 2010).
            Another example can be found in NBA player DeShawn Stevenson, who in 2001 was found guilty of the statutory rape of a fourteen year old girl. Whether the case was tried as a felony or a misdemeanour was up to the judge, and Superior Court Judge Dale Ikeda chose misdemeanour. Stevenson pleaded “no contest,” and was sentenced to 100 hours of community service, two years of probation and a fine of $1,100.  He served no jail time, and went on to play professional basketball for the Orlando Magic and the Washington Wizards in the NBA.
            Instead of serving his community service hours on the side of the road picking up trash, Stevenson instead served his hours as a “celebrity guest” and counsellor at six youth basketball camps. Fifty of his hours were spent greeting players and “helping” at various events such as the Lil’ Bow Wow celebrity game. Another ten were spent in New Jersey, where Stevenson registered attendees and kept score of basketball games at Sonny Vaccaro’s Camp for Elite High School Basketball Players. He was transported there in a professional car service, provided by Sonny’s Vaccaro’s Camp. At another camp where he fulfilled his community service requirements, Stevenson was awarded twenty-four hours over a three-day period and given a sixty dollar allowance each day. Finally, twenty seven of Stevenson’s official community service hours are attributed to travel time, as he rode to and from the various camps (McCarthy 2006).
            So what is it about professional athletes that makes us forgive and forget so easily? One reason is obvious: they have money. Often boasting a salary of millions of dollars per year, professional athletes can afford to spend tremendous amounts of money to settle cases out of court, avoiding prosecution, serious jail time, and negative media attention.
In July 1991, boxer Mike Tyson was arrested for the rape of eighteen year-old Desiree Washington. Before his trial began in 1992, Washington was offered $1 million to settle the case privately and to drop all charges against Tyson (Duncan 2004, p. 28). Although she refused, it is important to note that such incidents can and do occur. In other words, professional athletes, to some extent, have the power to prevent punishment—all with the flash of a check book. Tyson, despite declaring bankruptcy in 2003, has accumulated more than $300 million over the course of his career, receiving up to $30 million for numerous fights (Rhinger 2008). Another reason that athletes may be punished less severely (or not at all) is due to the nature and changing locality of their careers; court dates might be postponed several months if players are needed in games cross-country.
Mike Tyson, in fact, is a prime example of athletes acting above the law. In 2007, police confiscated numerous bags of cocaine from both his pocket and his car. A citizen may have received up to four years in prison for this offense; in November of that same year, the former world heavyweight champion was sentenced to just twenty four hours behind bars and a probationary period of three years on the account of drug possession and driving under the influence of alcohol. He was also required to pay a fine, submit to drug tests and serve 360 hours of community service (Rhinger 2008). All of this, however, is substantially more agreeable than serving hard time. And hard time is exactly what a non-celebrity offender would have had to do.
            When it comes to criminal convictions, professional athletes are simply treated differently. A Georgetown study found that when athletes are charged with crimes, their conviction rate is 38%; for the general population, the conviction rate is 80% (Valen 2009). From heavyweight boxers to footballers to seven foot basketball players towering above us, one thing is clear: all professional athletes tower above the law.

  

Works Cited

Byrne, Mitch, 2007. Footy’s bad boys-is it really their fault? University of Wollongong News and Media, [internet]. 24 May. Available at:
[Accessed 13 May 2010]

Duncan, Joyce, 2004. Sport in American Culture: from Ali to X-Games. New York: ABC-CLIO Ltd

Garganese, Chris, 2010. It’s Unfair that footballers are punished more severely for taking cocaine than steroids. Goal.com, [editorial]. 14 Jan. Available at:
[Accessed 19 May 2010].

Kim, Janine Young, and Parlow, Matthew J., 2009. Off-court misbehaviour: sports leagues and private punishment. Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, [internet]. Summer. Available at:
[Accessed 10 May 2010].

McCarthy, Mike, 2006. Athletes lightly punished after their day in court. USA Today, [internet]. 4 May. Available at:
[Accessed 10 May 2010].

Rhinger, Kurt, 2008. Tyson proves again that athletes and celebrities are above the law. University Chronicle, [internet]. 31 January. Available at:
[Accessed 11 May 2010].

Valen, Christopher, 2009. Athletes and crimes. Crimspace, [internet]. 17 January. Available at:
[Accessed 12 May 2010].

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