Tuesday, March 29, 2022
The Slap
If you wait long enough, everything ends up being about criminal law. Everything.
Even the Oscars, it turns out. On Sunday night, Chris Rock-- the host, for some reason-- told a joke about Will Smith's wife, Jada Pinkett Smith. Then Will Smith went onto the stage and smacked Rock.
It was definitely weird. It sure looked like it might be staged, and both Rock and Smith have plenty of experience with stage battle. But... then Smith started dropping f-bombs as he yelled at Rock. So maybe not.
Some observations:
-- It definitely was a simple assault or battery as defined in most jurisdictions (though I don't know California law on this), which is usually a misdemeanor. And, of course, it is often not charged at all; people get in a fight and no one cares too much.
-- You can imagine that if an usher making $17 an hour had been the one to go up and smack Chris Rock, he would have been hauled off and probably charged. So there's that.
-- The thing that bugged me the most about the whole thing was a statement by the LA police department that Rock had declined to file a police report, so nothing would happen. It's a variation on the myth that criminal cases happen when victims decide to "file charges." Let's be clear: prosecutors file charges (or seek them from a Grand Jury), not victims. Back in the 1700's before there were public prosecutors, cases did begin with a victim complaint, but that has been in the past for a long time. This myth is used by prosecutors to avoid accountability for hard choices, sadly.
