Scrutiny of the Bounty

You may have heard that a number of the New Orleans Saints defensive players are themselves on the defensive about their pooling of money to create a fund from which bounties would be paid for hits that knocked an opponent out of the game, and paid more for hits that caused them to be unable to leave the field under their own power.

Some of the penalties expected from this discovery may start raining down as early as this week. Coaches and players alike will probably be hit with fines and suspensions.

And inevitably, someone now suggests that a law be passed against such kind of excessively violent activity in sports, as mentioned in this post at The Sports Economist. The Econ post quotes another blogger who maintains that There Oughtta Be a Law.

I'm not a lawyer, but I think there are already laws against deliberate attempts to injure another person as badly as the Saints' bounty scheme dealt with. Obviously battery laws are somewhat relaxed when you consider sports events, especially ones like football and boxing in which players deliberately collide with or strike other players as a part of the game. But if a hit is a blatant attempt to injure or maim, I don't believe those exemptions apply if someone wanted to arrest a supposed perpetrator. If that hit caused a career-ending injury, then I don't think someone who deliberately engineered it could hide from lawsuits under the cover of the natural violence of the game.

Nor do I think the natural violence of the game, agreed upon by everybody on the field, would protect against conspiracy charges if someone involved in an injury bounty scheme did cause a career-ending injury or permanent disability or maiming.

You could argue that current laws make it tough to sort between ordinary play in a violent game and deliberate attempts to injure. Maybe they do, but new laws would do no better and would just add to the confusion. The post referred to by the Sports Economist writer is a pretty good example of a legitimate problem not being addressed by systems that can already handle it, but by unnecessary new laws that allow some legislator to grab some headlines and some public goodwill for taking a stand on an issue of the moment. And I think we've got enough of those already.