During his court appearance Monday, Chris Brown admitted to beating and choking Rihanna the night before the Grammys. Given the damning evidence including witnesses, including a damning photo of Rihanna’s beaten face and countless pieces of evidence putting Brown and Rihanna in the car together, it seemed like Brown would at least spend one day in jail.
But after reaching a plea agreement yesterday, it’s clear celebrities get much better treatment, even when they beat the crap out of world-renowned pop singers. TMZ has the details:
“He’ll spend 180 days doing community labor (8 hours a day — 1440 hours total) — which is, in effect, hard labor. He’ll do his service in Virginia which is where Brown lives. A Virginia law enforcement officer told us Brown will be picking up trash, pulling weeds and washing fire trucks.
He gets 5 years probation for FELONY assault — he pled guilty. He’ll get supervised probation. He’ll have to come back to court every three months.
He must enroll in a domestic violence counseling program.
If Brown violates probation, he could get up to 4 years in prison.
Brown is now a convicted felon and loses the the following rights: To own a gun, to sit on a jury, subject to search and seizure without a search warrant and he now has limitations on travel.”
Each line of this TMZ excerpt is ridiculous. We don’t know what happened between Brown and Rihanna that February night, but Brown beat the crap out of Rihanna. That’s clear. We have wide-spread visual evidence of that and one would think he would get at least a day in jail because people have stayed in jail for much less than what he did.
There are three reasons that stand out, in my mind, how Brown managed to get a plea agreement that didn’t include jail. First off, he has the money to buy the best lawyers in the world. These lawyers are able to get this kind of plea agreement all the time. On top of that, Brown’s lawyers were also fantastic trial attorneys as well. So, either way, the LA prosecuters would probably be outmatched (like Rihanna versus Brown).
Second, finding a jury in Los Angeles who haven’t at least heard of Brown beating Rihanna would be nearly impossible. The jury selection process would have taken a long, long time in this case and the prosecuter would have to spend a lot of time just picking the jury, which wouldn’t be a very good use of his time.
Lastly, I think the LA prosecutor believes that Brown’s public humiliation absorbs a great deal of the need for Brown to serve jail time and, in the long run, the public keeping an eye on Brown will prove to be more effective than locking him up for a couple months. More importantly, Chris Brown’s career will never recover from this.
What do you think about the Brown sentencing?
