Plaxico Burress, Donte’ Stallworth, and Michael Vick: Three Convictions Explained

We’ve now seen Plaxico Burress, Michael Vick, and Donte’ Stallworth all get jail sentences. There’s been a lot of talk about what’s fair and what’s not—only Stallworth’s crime resulted in a death, and it carried the lightest punishment—and digging a little further into the laws broken sheds some light on why the sentences seem so uneven.

So now that the hubbub has died down and everyone’s heard the stories, let’s break down and compare these jail sentences.

Plaxico Burress

The Incident: Plaxico Burress, wide receiver formerly of the New York Giants, took a unlicensed pistol, tucked into his pants, into a New York nightclub. The gun accidentally discharged, hitting Burress in the right thigh.

The Punishment: Two years in prison, and an additional two years of supervised release.

The Breakdown: Plaxico Burress is lucky he only shot himself. But other than that, life isn’t good.

Burress was indicted on two counts of criminal possession of a weapon in the second degree, and a single count of reckless endangerment in the second degree. The former two are class C felonies, which carry a minimum of a year in prison, with a maximum of 5 1/2 years. The latter is a class A misdemeanor, and has a maximum one year jail sentence.

Knowing that, it’s easy to see that Burress got a fairly light sentence compared to the maximum. Note that the charges are not related to Burress shooting himself, or even to the fact that the gun fired. New York just has steep gun laws, and that’s where Burress got nailed.

Burress lives in New Jersey to be close to the Giants’ facilities. The state of New York, however, does not issue handgun licenses to non-residents, so Burress would have been unable to secure a license to carry the gun anywhere in the state.

Even if he was licensed, the gun still should have been holstered; and he should not have been drinking while carrying it. Gun laws are strict because carrying a handgun can be supremely dangerous to other people, and if Burress’s stray bullet had hit someone other than himself we’d be having a very different conversation.

Solution? Don’t carry a gun. But maybe that’s making things too easy.

Donte’ Stallworth

The Incident: Donte’ Stallworth, wide receiver for the Cleveland Browns, hit and killed 59-year-old Mario Reyes with his Bentley at 7:15 am one morning in Miami. Stallworth was intoxicated well above Florida’s legal limit: his blood-alcohol content was .126, and Florida’s limit is .08. Reyes reportedly ran into traffic on the 4-lane highway while trying to catch a bus, and was not in a crosswalk.

The Punishment: 30 days in jail, two years under house arrest, eight years on probation, and he will not be allowed to hold a driver’s license again for the rest of his life.

The Breakdown: Stallworth got very, very lucky.

Under Florida law, DUI manslaughter (which Stallworth is guilty of) is a second-degree felony. It mandates a jail term of up to 15 years—with a minimum of four.

It’s a good thing he called the police, too, and didn’t leave the scene: doing so would up it to a first-degree felony, which can go up to 30 years of jail time (both under Manslaughter and Vehicular Homicide-s. 316.193 (3), F.S.).

But Stallworth played the game correctly. He stayed on the scene, called the police, and eventually plead guilty. The court accepted the plea, which allows Stallworth to only serve the 30 days in prison (along with the other stipulations). He also paid out a undisclosed-but-likely-large sum of money to Reyes’ family, in settlement of a civil suit.

But did he deserve more punishment, since his actions ended someone’s life?

The difference between Stallworth’s situation and those of Burress and Vick is the accidental nature of his act. While some will argue that drunk driving is just as dangerous as carrying a loaded gun, the law treats them very differently.

Florida places the burden of proof on the plaintiff in a DUI manslaughter case—meaning that the prosecution would have to prove that it was entirely because of Stallworth’s intoxication that he hit and killed Reyes. That’s a stretch in this case, however, as the defense could make a reasonable case that Reyes simply ran into traffic and could have gotten hit by anyone, intoxicated or not.

That all said, the non-jail portions of the punishment are often overlooked. Donte’ Stallworth will never have a driver’s license again—and that seems like an appropriate repercussion for the incident.

Whew. I made it through all of that without asking why Stallworth was drunk at 7:00 in the morning.

Michael Vick

The Incident: For six years, now-Philadelphia Eagles quarterback Michael Vick financed an operated a multi-state dogfighting operation which included both dog fights and executions, and thousands of dollars-worth of gambling on the fights.

The Punishment: 23 months in federal prison, and paying over $928,000 to care for the dogs seized from the property. He was also sentenced to three years incarceration and a $2,500 fine by the state of Virginia, which was suspended on the terms that he pay the court costs and serve four years probation.

The Breakdown: Michael Vick is old news by now, but it’s popular to gripe about how Stallworth’s sentence was shorter than Vick’s, when Vick only affected dogs and Stallworth killed a human being. Here’s why that’s the case.

The Virginia state dogfighting law carries a maximum 5-year prison term, with a $2,500 fine. He was sentenced to 3 years, though it was suspended—likely because he served the federal term.

It becomes federal jurisdiction, then, because it crossed state lines (the ring also included North Carolina, South Carolina, and Maryland). Under a law established in 1976 specifically covering animal fighting and transporting animals across state lines for fighting, Vick faced up to a year in prison and a $100,000 fine.

The real problem, though, was that the amount of time that the dogfighting ring had been around made it subject to the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO)—a law that calls for larger penalties for organized crime, initially put in place to prosecute Mafia members.

Vick eventually pled guilty to “Conspiracy to Travel in Interstate Commerce in Aid of Unlawful Activities and to Sponsor a Dog in an Animal Fighting Venture”—yep, there’s a law called that.

Vick’s 23-month prison sentence was actually longer than the 12-18 month term recommended by the prosecution, and was noted by legal experts to be unexpectedly harsh. His two partners in the crime received sentences of 18 and 21 months, with Vick’s being longer because his involvement was deeper.

The reason that Michael Vick’s sentence is so much longer than Donte’ Stallworth’s is because, as the judge noted, Vick’s actions were “not a momentary lack of judgment”. They were premeditated, lengthy, and extensive—three things that Stallworth’s act was not.

Ultimately, it seems that none of the three guilty parties got preferential celebrity treatment—arguably the closest is Stallworth, and he’s the least celebrity of the three—and each got a punishment appropriate to the laws that were broken.

And ideally, now that there is an even stronger precedent of legal punishment for professional athletes behaving badly, we’ll see a greater motivation for players to clean up their act.