Ray Rice Gets His Job Back.....

In a stunning turn of events an arbitrator has overturned the NFL's decision to ban Ray Rice from the National Football League indefinitely. The news initially came as a shock to me given the fact that the notorious pieces of footage shown around the world clearly shows Rice savagely knocking out his then fiancé, Janay Palmer.

Barbara S. Jones, a onetime district court judge, heard Rice’s appeal over a two-day session earlier this month in which the running back argued that he had been penalized twice for the same incident: once when Goodell suspended him for two games and fined him $500,000, and again a few months later when he was suspended indefinitely after a video of the incident was published by TMZ.

Jones disagreed with the N.F.L.'s argument that Rice had misrepresented the severity of the incident when he met with Goodell in June to determine the original penalty. Her words are certain to raise fresh questions about Goodell’s handling of the biggest crisis of his eight-year tenure as commissioner as well as bolster his critics who claim that his control over the N.F.L.'s personal conduct policy should be diluted.

“I have found that Rice did not mislead the commissioner,” she wrote. “Moreover, any failure on the part of the league to understand the level of violence was not due to Rice’s description of the event, but to the inadequacy of words to convey the seriousness of domestic violence. That the league did not realize the severity of the conduct without a visual record also speaks to their admitted failure in the past to sanction this type of conduct more severely.”

“Ray Rice is a free agent and has been eligible to be signed by an N.F.L. team since he was released by the Ravens,” the statement said. “Based on Judge Jones’ decision, he will be eligible to play upon signing a new contract.”

At the time of this writing I doubted that any team would sign him. I truely believed that no NFL franchise can stand the bad publicity or backlash. But to my surprise there is actually a team that is considering signing Rice to a new contract. If another team does sign Rice, it will undoubtedly be the fasted recovery in the history of sports scandal, and send a message to abuser's everywhere. "You can get away with it."

It's a shame that "Law and Order Special Victims Unit" has gotten better at serving justice, in some cases, than the real justice system. But then again, the truth always has and always will be, stranger than fiction.

PR