At the end of the day its a WOMAN.
Yeah, and?
At the end of the day, a woman can kill a man. You see a handful of cases of female on male murder every year in the courts.
I really hope you're not one of those people who scoff at female-on-male domestic violence, considering my brother was a victim of exactly this and it's a very real phenomenon. Females CAN injure, cripple, and even kill males. There is no y chromosome immunity to female based damage here in the real world.
Now I'm gonna backtrack on some stuff I said earlier in this thread because I do feel like the physical mismatch needs to be taken into consideration, and I do think that at the end of the day Mixon's plea bargain was probably fair if not lenient simply based on damage done. But at the same time, I can't help feeling that blanket statements that effectively take Molitor's side only and exactly because she's female miss the point in a huge way.
Perhaps I also have a bit of a white guilt problem because I'm a little nervous about some folks being so quick to take the side of a white woman who was clearly doing her own share of abuse against a black man, in a mostly-white establishment. There are some things you just don't say to a black man and based on some of what I read, Molitor said nearly all of them.
I also feel that Molitor showed such bad judgment in her actions that brought this to a head that even though Mixon showed terrible judgment, the most I'd be comfortable proposing here based on the facts as I understand them is matching penalties. Certainly Mixon should not be the only one suffering consequences based on what I saw. Molitor WAS the one who took it physical, that's not up for debate. The law is here to protect the stupid, but not to reward stupid. Molitor had no business being stupid enough to mix it up physically with a pro running back. I can get behind punishing Mixon as a disincentive because you don't want to reward what he did... I just feel that making him a permanent pariah or attaching labels to him that stick for life just doesn't fit the facts.
Frankly I'm also not as convinced as some on this thread seem to be that Mixon had nothing to fear. I doubt Molitor could have done him any permanent injury, although you never want to give a 0% chance of anything when alcohol is a factor, but Molitor and the male friend together might have done some damage if he hadn't shut the fight down hard before the other guy had a chance to pile on in. Remember he had been directly involved in the exchange of
pleasantries in the parking lot and was a party to the disagreement. "I'll distract 'em you suckerpunch 'em" is the oldest fighting tactic in the world. Even if he had no plan to do that, if Mixon feared that that was what was going on, that might trigger the legal standard for self defense. Just food for thought.
The end of the discussion for me is simply that I feel that there is way too much gray in this situation to apply life-altering labels to Mixon over what he did. He was stupid and violent and the target is female. Is that enough to give him the permanent lifetime label of a woman-beater? Others say a definite yes, I don't feel it's that clearcut. If there were other incidents I'd feel differently, even if all of those incidents fell into a gray area too, and if he'd continued his counterattack (and it WAS a counterattack) against Molitor after she was down, that would be enough to seal the deal for any fairminded personm but based on this one situation where there's clearly more than enough fault to go round... I just don't feel the rush to judgment is warranted.