Criminal Law and Sports
As I am sure most people reading this are aware, there was an intense and physical football game recently played between the Pittsburgh Steelers and Cincinnati Bengals. Pittsburgh’s star receiver, Antonio Brown, was ruled out against the Denver Broncos due to a vicious hit he took from a Cincinnati player named Vontaze Burfict. Burfict is the same player who the Steelers accused of celebrating after Le’Veon Bell suffered a season ending injury and appeared to have intentionally kneed Ben Roethlisberger in the shoulder after tackling him.
Jim Bordas and I were recently talking about the game, and Jim made the joking comment that the hit on Brown was almost criminal, which made me wonder if anyone has been prosecuted criminally based on their actions while playing a professional sport. Some of the possible events that came to mind were a baseball player suffering a severe injury after intentionally getting hit by a pitch, a hockey player taking a fight too far, or even a fight similar to what happened between the Indiana Pacers and Detroit Pistons in 2004, which was nicknamed the “Malice at the Palace.”
Based on my limited research, I found very few cases that have been filed against athletes for actions taken while they were playing a professional sport. One story I found said, in 1969, Wayne Maki of the St. Louis Blues intentionally swung his hockey stick at Boston Bruins player Ted Green during a preseason exhibition game in Ottawa, which fractured Mr. Green’s skull. Both players were involved in two fights during the relevant game and both were charged with assault after the game. No conviction resulted from either case, but the Canadian court noted that sports were not immune from criminal prosecution.
The first United States sports case I found was where a player was criminally prosecuted occurred in 1975. In this case, Dave Forbes, who played for the Boston Bruins, knocked down a player on the other team and began to continuously punch the player in the back of his head. Although this appears to be a clear case, Dave Forbes was acquitted on all counts.
In my limited research, Todd Bertuzzi was the only person I found who actually pled or was found guilty based on an act that took place while playing professional sports. Bertuzzi sucker-punched Colorado’s Steven Moore, which resulted in two broken vertebrae, a concussion, deep lacerations from when Mr. Moore was driven into the ice and stretching of the nerves in his neck. Bertuzzi pled guilty to the assault charge after arranging a plea bargain with the prosecutors. As a part of his plea, he was required to do 80 hours of community service and was on probation for one year, which actually prohibited him from playing in any hockey game that Moore was also playing in.
Personally, I think an athlete knows what he or she is signing up for when making the decision to participate in a violent sport and any criminal punishment should be saved for only the extreme circumstances when an athlete goes well beyond the rules of the sport. What do our readers think, should athletes be punished criminally when they cross the line? If so, what does crossing the line look like in a hard hitting game such as football?
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