A Tale of Two Football Players Michael Vick & Donte Stallworth / Dog vs. Man

OK, I know I’m not the only person to notice the irony (or the tragedy) of this, but I have to say something anyway.

It’s simply this: Michael Vicks gets 23 months in a federal prison for running an illegal dog-fighting business. Another NFL player recently runs over a guy while driving drunk and kills him. Donte Stallworth’s punishment? A mere 30 days in prison and 1,000 hours of community service. Oh, and he’s not allowed to get a driver’s license for the rest of his life.

Kill or harm a dog and you get two years. Kill a human being — a pedestrian, at that — and you could just possibly get less than a month in jail.

Of course, a conviction is never simple. We all know it’s judged on a case-by-case basis and the series of circumstances. Unfortunately, it seems your likeability, your ability to hire the best lawyers and, it seems in the case of Stallworth, being able to pay a large out-of-court settlement to the victim’s family also can influence the outcome of your verdict.

But … getting back to the dog and human angle.

There’s no question that Michael Vicks’ treatment of the dogs involved in his scheme was wrong and gruesome. Though I don’t enjoy having a ball of fur underfoot or in my bed, it was still heartbreaking to see the vicious treatment of the dogs. That can only mean that it was understandable why a whole lot of pet lovers were distraught and outraged over the news.

More than two years later, people are still debating whether Vicks is really remorseful about his crime.

But then there’s Mario Reyes: A husband who was married for 20 years, the father of a 15-year-old daughter and a baseball fan. Reyes was crossing the street to get to a bus when he was hit by Stallworth’s car.

Maybe it’s me … but I haven’t heard a whole lot of outrage over the drunk driving accident that took Reyes’ life.

I have one theory. We’re so familiar with the idea of someone getting killed because of drunk driving that it’s no longer a shock to our system. In 2007, more than 41,000 people lost their lives to drunk driving. On the other hand, the news of dogs being brutally harmed because of someone’s sick idea of entertainment is shocking because it is so unfamiliar to many of us.

But whatever the reason for the general public’s unbalanced outrage over the life of a dog compared to the life of a human, you’d think that the scales of justice would tilt more in favor of the loss of a human life.

What are your thoughts? Should Stallworth have been sent to a slammer a lot longer than Vicks?

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by Shari Scales Finnell