Jalen's Sentence
Dammit. :(
Bad freshman, bad!
/s
Drunk driving is never a minor offense. Let's not rehash though...
I'm all for harsh sentencing when it comes to impaired driving. Bring it.
My beef with this is simply that there is no uniformity in Oakland County courts. Judge Small is effectively legislating from the bench. And that reeks of grandstanding. State Government should create standardized sentencing for this, and be done with it.
This is about as poor an example from legislating from the bench as I have scene. It's a common go-to complaint about judges when they do something that people don't like. But this ain't it. Drunk driving first in Michigan is a 93-day misdemeanor in the state of Michigan. The legislature decided so. There are some pretty sturdy sentencing guidelines in the state of Michigan when it comes to felonies, but not misdemeanors. It's almost impossible to guideline misdemeanors, and we don't want our judges to anyway. We want them to have flexibility to sentence on a case by case basis. Our legislature has decided that any sentence between probabation and 93 days in jail is acceptable for a first time drunk driver. Some judges will go to the light end of that scale, some judges will go to the high end. This judge isn't operating outside her power. In fact, if you read some of the history on her, she went a little light compared to what she's done in the past.
He should've pulled this off in LA and then hired Lindsay Lohan's lawyer. Then he could give the judge the finger and say, "Don't you know I'm famous?" and the charges would've been dropped.
My friend's father was the judge in one of her latest ordeals and he gave her quite a stern talking-to about her sense of entitlement on top of the strictest punishment he could give her.
This was after she stole a car, drove recklessly while completely intoxicated, failed to spend more than five minutes in jail, failed to obey any of probationary requirements, assaulted somone in rehab, got drunk while wearing the monitoring bracelet, threw lavish parties at her mansion, claimed she couldn't go to additonal rehab because she was broke, and stole a necklace.
But your friend's dad gave her a stern talking-to.
Oh.
Okay.
I said, "Jalen's got three chances in the 48th District Court and two of them are very bad."
Without hammering Jalen (I am admittedly prejudiced; prejudiced, that is, in favor of Jalen), and without taking sides on the merits or demerits of any of the three 48th District Judges (each of whom has encountered their own minor scandals/controversies in recent years), it probably did not help Jalen, that the Detroit Free Press just finished a long investigative story on how drunk driving cases are sentenced in 48th District Court. Judge Small has probably never been under such a media microscope at any time in her young career.
I just don't think that it is a coincidence, that the Freep story was timed to precede Jalen's sentencing date by just a day or so. It is almost as if a large part of Free Press editorial decisions are wound around University of Michigan athletics. And admittedly I am not sure that there was any definitive pro-Jalen or anti-Jalen angle on the part of the Free Press; just an attitude of, Hey it's a Michigan Wolverine athlete! It will sell loads of papers, and generate a million webpage hits from all over the country!
As I've written many, many times before; just look at the Freep.com home page for "Most Read, Most Commented, Most E-mailed stories." Michigan athletics is like cash money for the Freep.
***WARNING -- FREE PRESS LINKS***
There are a fair number of MGoBlog readers who are not in Michigan. And who might not have been aware of the Free Press' lead-up to the long-scheduled Jalen Rose sentencing date.
To eliminate any doubt about the coordinated effort on this story, and to be clear, the Freep ran a two-part story about drunk driving arrests in the West Blomfield area, starting July 24. L.L. Brasier was one of the co-authors:
http://www.freep.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=2011107240496
Part 2 (July 25):
http://www.freep.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=2011107250334
And now, L.L. Brasier (not Mark Snyder, not any sports reporter), does the Jalen-sentencing story (July 27):
http://www.freep.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=2011110727004
And finally L.L. Brasier's "Judge Small Uses Jalen Rose to Send a Message" story (July 28):
http://www.freep.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=2011107280516
Thanks for the Freep link warnings, but haven't you heard that all Freep stories are infected with malware? Even the print stories are infected. I read this in the Detroit News.
/s
The kind of malware that I associate with the Free Press is the kind of malware that can infect readers' brains even when their computers are turned off and they are reading a hard-copy of the newspaper. The Free Press' malware problem is with their content, and their editorial decisions.
Was it Dickow-D'agostini that lied under oath in a federal case costing the county a few million? Oakland county prosecutorial system has been fucked for a long time. Anyone remember our esteemed Prosecutor Gorcya? I promise I'm not trying to get political but this just a down right POS human being for saying this.
"Julian and Thal Wendrow said they still feel the suspicion in people's eyes. And they still worry police or prosecutors will show up on their doorstep again.
But the prosecutors involved in the case are no longer with the Oakland County Prosecutor's Office.
Former Prosecutor David Gorcyca is now in private practice. In July 2009, the National Law Review asked him whether he owed the Wendrows an apology.
"Over my dead body," he responded."
If you're not from Oakland County/SEMI read this Free Press piece. It's a long 6 part series but well done. I honestly had to hold back tears. Real fucked up.
It's a crazy-long sentence for a first offense.
I've known Judge Small since she was a law student; she's a very bright person, and usually exxtremely fair. However, drunk driving offenses seem to be her "cause."
Well, it's cool to have a cause, and it's good to be strict to a point, but it's also good to have the legal system be consistent.
There is no convincing her, however.
As to the Oakland County Prosecutor's office, it's been a cult of personality ever since the days of Brooks Patterson, and is not to be trusted. It doesn't work like most Prosecutors' or US Attorneys' offices. The only thing that has ever worked is to put every agreement with it on the record or in a written order.
Rose is a celebrity and wealthy. He should have been fined up the ying yang then forced to do 100's of hours of community service, IMO that would have been more humiliating than jail.
As an aside, as a nation we are jailing people for longer and longer for lesser and lesser crimes, in addition to using jails to warehouse the mentally ill. Disturbing.
"The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons."
Dostoevsky
Or watching its blood sports...like football!