I understand that dog fighting is illegal and I am not condoning Vick’s actions, but 23 months is an awful long time for this crime in my opinion. There appears to be far too much subjectiveness in our judicial systems. During this whole situation, I have read Vick’s possible sentence being anywhere from no jail time to 5 years. That’s a fairly large amount of “wiggle room” to basically take away a person’s life as we know it. Again, I am not condoning Vick’s actions, but it seems like we are putting an animal or animals in this case, above a human life.

We live in a society with many contradictions. PETA put forth a concerted nationwide effort to voice their displeasure with Michael Vick, but at the same time, ESPN boasts a headline in which a 5 year old killed a 400 pound bear and he becomes a television star on his local news channel. Bears, Deer, Elk, etc. are routinely killed just to be mounted on someones wall or used as a funny looking rug as in the case of the ESPN story. How are those for contradictions? In my opinion, there’s a fine line between punishing a criminal and criminal punishment. The question is which side of the line is this 23 month sentence?