Ed Alexander, who's been quoted before in this weblog, sends the following…
Y'know, I'm not sure that the penalties Mel Gibson will be undergoing aren't more onerous than you make them out to be. No matter what amount the judge might have fined him, there'd be no hardship meeting it, so the penalty couldn't really be financially commensurate with other folks who'd been found guilty of the same thing. As odd as it sounds, I have a feeling that the loss of regard and esteem with which a large percentage of the public held him in is more of a penalty than any fiduciary penalty that he judge might have placed on him.
That said, I wouldn't have minded if probation, loss of license and amount of actual community service he had to perform weren't greater (making an anti-DUI PSA doesn't really take much energy since someone else will write it for him and the crew will film it) but I'm not sure that jail time would be any more appropriate in this case than it would be for anyone else who was stopped and caught during a first offense. Since prisons have essentially become rape factories, I think that a victimless crime should be punished through other venues if there's a damn good chance that would result in there being no repeat offense. I tend to think that the real reason I'm offended by his behavior that evening was more for the offensively intolerant behavior than for the DUI, and I think that the court of public perception is a more appropriate venue for meting out punishment than a court of law. Hopefully that sentence will be appropriate to the offense.
Ed, I'm going to disagree with almost every sentence of the above. First off, I don't think drunk driving is a "victimless crime" — or to the extent it is, it's victimless out of dumb luck, not because of anything the drunk driver did. If someone goes out on his porch and starts firing live ammo around indiscriminately, he might not kill anyone. His actions might be victimless. That guy still oughta be locked up, even if there's zero chance of him doing it again.
Secondly, I'm not qualified to judge whether there could be a repeat offense of Mr. Gibson's inebritated actions…but this was not the first time the man's been pulled over for driving under the influence.
I'll agree with the part about the court of public opinion but only with regard to the reported anti-Semetic remarks. There are laws against getting behind the wheel while plastered and they ought to be enforced with more severity, if only as an example to the next guy who's inclined to break them.
There's a tendency among people who are rich, powerful, famous or some combination of those attributes to think that the law doesn't apply to them in quite the same way it applies to the poor, the powerless, the unknown. They assume many in authority will look the other way and if someone doesn't, a well-coiffed, high-fee lawyer can always put things right. I don't know if Mel Gibson is in this category but the fact that he will get away with no serious impairment to his life will surely heighten others' sense that if they get caught with a bit too much alcohol in their veins, the punishment won't be too severe.
It would be interesting for some reporter to dig into records and find similar cases where a driver with Gibson's history has been pulled over for a similar infraction. Have miscreants without his clout or cash received comparable sentences? If not, something is wrong. If so, something is still wrong but it's a different something.