Let's imagine you're Pete Rose. I know you have a much better haircut than that but bear with me. You're Pete Rose. And you get kicked out of Major League Baseball for betting on games, which you deny. The banishment has two downsides. One is that it puts a severe cramp in your earning power. The other is that your name is blackened and you're denied admission to the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown.
Wait: I've got a better idea. Let's imagine you're two Pete Roses. You're the Guilty Pete Rose who actually, like the evidence seemed to show pretty conclusively, bet on baseball and then lied his ass off denying it, attacking all accusers. And let's also imagine you're the Innocent Pete Rose who really didn't do what they say you did. I know it's a stretch but let's remember. Almost every week in this country, DNA testing frees someone from Death Row…someone who looked inarguably guilty to a whole lot of people. If someone can be convicted unanimously and go through the whole appeals process and rot in prison for ten years and still be innocent, it's at least remotely conceivable that there is an Innocent Pete Rose.
Okay, right now you're Guilty Pete Rose. The denials haven't worked. No one believes you and it's getting pretty obvious that no one is ever going to believe you. In the meantime, the window of eligibility for you to get into the Hall of Fame is about to close. Wouldn't this be a good time to confess? Write your autobiography so you can make some serious money off the confession, but confess. Get the book out while there's still time for a Pete Rose Apology Tour before that eligibility period ends. Make the rounds of talk shows, say how dreadfully sorry you are, maybe even sob a little. The publicity will make your book a best seller…as of this A.M., twelfth place on the Amazon Best Seller list, and the book doesn't even get released until Thursday. The sympathy will be great. The public will want to reward you for getting your life back on track, and they'll want to demonstrate forgiveness. You'll get into the Hall of Fame with ease…or at least, you'll have the best possible shot of making that happen. The confession makes sense.
Now, let's say you're Innocent Pete Rose. As you've maintained for umpteen years, you didn't bet on baseball; not the way they said, anyway. You're well aware that Major League Baseball is full of guys who've done that and much, much worse. You've been around the game for a long time. You know all the dirt about players who've been involved with heavy drugs, blackout drinking, cheating on games, beating up women in hotel rooms and financial shenanigans that make the allegations against you look like overdue fines at Blockbuster. You see that the baseball establishment pretends all this stuff doesn't go on but that every so often, to cling to the fiction that ballplayers are all like Boy Scouts, they have to spank one of them. Just to maintain the fiction that players are held to some high moral and ethical standard. Since you're not guilty (or maybe just not as guilty as they say), you don't see why you should accept the public flogging. You refuse to go along with it which, of course, makes some people even angrier with you.
We do that a lot in this country. We assume people are guilty of some crime and then we decide it's a moral failing, worse than the crime itself, that they won't "accept responsibility" and admit we're right. I'm all for people accepting responsibility for their transgressions, but there needs to be some recognition that sometimes people are wrongly accused. A lot of those guys freed from Death Row after ten years could have gotten lighter sentences if they'd confessed early-on to the crime they didn't commit. That they didn't was taken as a sign that they weren't rehabilitated.
But your stonewall, stick-to-the-truth defense isn't working, Innocent Pete. Your bank account is down, you're not in the Hall of Fame, the eligibility period is ending soon, and you're long past the point where you're ever going to convince anyone you didn't do it. So what do you do? Same thing as Guilty Pete Rose. Write the book, tell them what they want to hear, collect the royalties, engineer a last-minute groundswell of support to get your butt into Cooperstown. Your income and your reputation can only profit from it.
I am not suggesting Innocent Pete Rose reflects the real situation. He sure looks guilty and of course, now that he's confessed, the slim possibility that he was wrongly accused becomes slimmer to the point of non-existence. But it has always bugged me that in the judicial system, plea bargaining often makes it less painful to take a punishment for something you didn't do than to hang in there and try to prove your innocence. I've paid traffic tickets I didn't deserve because I would suffer less by confessing to the lie. I'm sure it goes on in larger, more life-alerting matters, as well. I guess it just bothers me that we often reach the point where guilt or innocence matter so little that they both lead to the same place. Whether he did it or not, Rose is going to do quite well from his confession. You can bet on it.