Commentary

NFL punished Rice more than legal system

Where's the outcry now?

Where's the national dialogue?

Where are the angry talking heads, defiant columnists and irate Twitter mob demanding the firing of Atlantic City District Attorney James McClain?

After the case-dismissed order signed by McClain earlier this week, Ray Rice is no longer a domestic-violence offender. After paying a $125 fine and completing some anger-management classes -- poof! -- all official verification of Rice knocking out his now-wife Janay in a casino elevator has been removed from his record.

And yet, there's an estimated 20,000 people in American prisons today because of marijuana-related charges.

To think, we all wanted NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell publicly flogged because we thought his original two-game suspension of Rice was too lenient. Maybe the American public owes Goodell an apology. As it turned out, the punishment doled out by the NFL was the only significant penalty Rice received for going Floyd Mayweather on his wife's head.

"Roger Goodell did more than the prosecutor," said Carol Wick, CEO of Harbor House, a shelter for domestic-violence survivors in Orlando, Fla. "There was public outrage aimed at Goodell, but what makes me sad is we haven't seen the same outrage toward the prosecutor in the case When a [criminal justice] system that is supposed to hold people accountable doesn't hold people accountable, it enables business leaders like Goodell and the rest of society to think, 'If they don't think it's a big deal, then why should I?' "

This was Goodell's monumental mistake from the beginning. The NFL commissioner foolishly took his lead from the criminal justice system when penalizing Rice. This would be like a struggling basketball player looking to Dwight Howard for guidance on improving his free-throw percentage. The criminal justice system is, quite frankly, a joke when it comes to convicting domestic-violence offenders.

Last year in Orange County, Fla., there were nearly 10,000 arrests on domestic-violence charges and Wick said her research shows that less than 2 percent of those arrests will result in convictions. And we're not a whole lot different than most other communities where there simply aren't enough resources and manpower devoted to these hard-to-prove cases.

Of course, this is no excuse for McClain, the prosecutor in Atlantic City, N.J., who let Rice walk away with a slap on the wrist. The reason these cases are so hard to prove is because victims often feel trapped and won't testify against their abusers. In Rice's case, McClain didn't need the victim to testify. He had an elevator video showing Rice knocking Janay unconscious.

"A lot of times you hear the victims getting blamed because they won't testify," Wick said. "When you have a homicide investigation, the victim can't testify and, yet, those cases are still pursued. Domestic-violence cases have to be prosecuted like homicides."

The good news amid the Rice fiasco is that domestic violence is at the forefront of the national consciousness. The NFL has a strict new policy in dealing with domestic-violence offenders, college football coaches are being held publicly accountable when they allow domestic abusers to remain on their teams, and sports as a whole has helped bring America's dirty little secret out into the public mainstream.

Tony Dungy, the former coach of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and the Indianapolis Colts, is the founder of All Pro Dad -- a faith-based organization that mentors men on how to become better fathers. Dungy's organization recently partnered with the Florida Coalition Against Domestic Violence because, Dungy said, "It's time for men to stand up and speak out against violence against women. ... When that [Ray Rice] video went viral, it caused us all to examine what this is really all about. It's given visibility to a problem that's been there for a long time."

After the viral video, more than 200,000 individual women tweeted out the reasons why they left or stayed in abusive relationships. Wick tells the story of a domestic-abuse survivor who recently left her job as a technology executive in Texas and has moved to Orlando and started Big Mountain Data -- an organization with the mission statement of "developing data science solutions to help in the fight against family abuse and violence."

"No, there wasn't justice in the Rice case, but there was a tremendous amount that we did gain from it," Wick said.

You could say that measly $125 fine will go down as the best money Ray Rice ever spent.

Sports on 05/26/2015

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