(September 9, 2014 at 8:28 am)Deidre32 Wrote: If he had knocked out a total stranger in public, he'd have been arrested.He was arrested, and convicted (guilty plea) and sentenced. I think the difference is that if it had been a stranger, he was more likely to get jail time (1-3 years was on the table, they went with a much lighter sentence).
I agree that the reaction by the team and league are inexcusable. Rice's explanation was that she had attacked him and thus he struck in self-defense, but she's not a physically imposing person. Rice stands 5' 8" tall and weighs around 215 lbs, and as a pro-athlete his build is thick with muscle. Palmer appears shorter, and based on her physique may be less than half of Rice's weight. The idea that he had to knock her unconscious out of some attempt to defend himself from attack is laughable, but until the video came out the league/team thought that they could just shrug their shoulders and say "we don't really know what happened." As if a guy bludgeoning his girlfriend and dragging her around like a sack of garbage might be mitigated by a few seconds of corroborating video.
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould
-Stephen Jay Gould
