Michael Vick: Just The Facts Ma'am. Just The Facts

I came across this breakdown of the controversial case against Michael Vick who is accused of a number of different charges in respect to his in-house dog fighting ring on blackprof.com, one of the blogs that I sometimes like to read. Even though this piece is a bit opinionated, it gives some tertiary facts that some may not have deciphered from the high-profile media coverage.

Vick, Proportionality, and Raceby
Shavar Jeffries (more posts)

Michael Vick plead guilty to three different conspiracy counts today. I must say that I've found the entire episode to be a comedy of the absurd. And without an available neutral principle to explain the vehemence of the reaction against Vick, I cannot comprehend the Vick experience in terms that are not inextricably linked to race.Let's start from the beginning: Vick was charged with three counts of conspiracy: 1) conspiring to gamble on dogfights -- an illegal activity -- and using violence to further that illegal activity -- apparently the killing of several of the dogs; 2) conspiring to engage in dogfighting; and 3) buying and transporting a dog in interstate commerce for use in a dogfight.

The first charge permits the imprisonment for up to five years; the second and third charges each permit only a maximum sentence of one year.The first is a charge under the Travel Act, a statute enacted in response to burgeoning organized crime and racketeering. While the statute was plainly geared toward mob activity, the language of the statute encompasses a wide range of conspiracies, largely due to definitional challenges in isolating those conspiracies specifically linked to traditional organized crime.

I doubt seriously that Congress contemplated that the killing of dogs would suffice as the kind of "crime of violence" that would justify prosecution under the Travel Act. And for good reason. Dog-killing does not pose the same sort of social, cultural, and economic harms that violence against human beings poses in the context of organized crime. That doesn't mean that dogfighting doesn't pose cognizable social harm; it simply means it isn't the sort contemplated by the Travel Act. Charging Vick under the Travel Act, in my view, is an unjustifiably expansive application of the statute, and is representative of the broader over-reaction to this episode.

The last two charges were brought under the Animal Fighting Venture Prohibition statute, which deals directly with organized animal fights and related activity. These charges trigger much more reasonable misdemeanor punishments, permitting imprisonment for less than one year and a fine of no more than $15,000. I say much more reasonable because, again, I cannot imagine Congress imagined applying the Travel Act to acts of violence involving animals, and in any case I believe the law does and should value violence against humans at a higher level than violence against animals.The fighting-venture statute also highlights some of the hypocrisy behind the Vick prosecution, as the statute specifically exempts fighting ventures involving "live birds" in those states that specifically legalize such ventures. This illuminates hypocrisy because I see no principle distinguishing the social or moral harm of indiscriminately killing dogs from that of indiscriminately killing "live birds." 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 love dogs, too, but I love humans more. Michael Vick should pay a price, but the price should be proportionate to the harm and should not cause more harm than necessary. Destroying the life of a 27-year-old because of his poor decisions concerning dogfighting would be unconscionable in a nation that prided mercy as much as this nation says it does. I don't like invoking the race card, but because I cannot explain the hysterical reaction to Vick's conduct on the basis of a neutral principle, I fall back to an unshakable perception: It wouldn't have went down like this is Mike Vick were white.