Remember Muntadhar al-Zeidi, the Iraqi reporter who last December threw his shoes at George W. Bush, yellng “this is from the widows and orphans and all those killed in Iraq”? That gesture just earned him three years in prison, and something tells me that if he’d been a white guy tossing shoes at Bush in Oklahoma, he’d have gotten six months probation and a stern talking-to.
I don’t happen to think a three-year sentence is all that proportionate for tossing your shoes at someone — especially considering that al-Zeidi missed, so no one was actually assaulted. But hey, that’s just my opinion. Let’s see if his crime seems as serious as some others that also earned three-year sentences recently:
- A drunken dad left his 1- and 3-year-old girls to freeze outside in the Saskatchewan winter, wearing just t-shirts and diapers. Both girls died in temperatures that dipped to -50°C with the wind chill factor. 100 proof vodka (50% alcohol) freezes at -40°C.
- Two men drowned a co-worker who couldn’t swim by tossing him off their boat. Though they insisted the death was an accident, APP reports that “Kulikowski and Lyons ultimately admitted they had grabbed Michael Augulis — one holding his upper torso and the other his feet — and swung him into the water while their boat was 2 miles offshore.”
- A Western tourist in Thailand kidnapped and sexually abused a 13-year-old boy, and was only arrested after international police found online photos of him allegedly abusing a dozen other boys.
I’m not saying three-year sentences are appropriate for crimes this awful — I don’t think they are. But they do say something about how justice systems weigh the seriousness of offences. Let’s see what sentences other folks received for throwing things at people:
- A father was sentenced to 400 hours of community service after throwing a knife at his daughter, and missing. He apparently received leniency because the judge felt his daughter was “not an easy person to deal with.”
- Back in 1985, a New York man threw a rock at a bus that almost hit him, and then scuffled with police who tried to arrest him and put him in their squad car, insisting that his Orthodox faith prevented him from riding in a car on the Jewish holiday of Sukkot. After pleading guilty to felony assault, he received three years probation, 300 hours of community services, and no jail time.
- A Cambridge student who threw his shoe at Chinese premier Wen Jiabao will face a maximum penalty of six months in jail and a $7,400 fine when he’s sentenced in June. Like al-Zeidi, the student missed.
All this to say, three years of jail time for tossing a pair of shoes at a guy seems pretty ridiculous to me. All the more so since he’ll be doing his time in the Iraqi prison system, where beatings and torture are routine. It’s worth noting that if he’d tossed his shoes at you, rather than a head of state, the cops probably wouldn’t have even bothered showing up.
3 responses so far ↓
1 Rawda // Mar 12, 2009 at 2:21 pm
Furthermore, Al-Zeidi will be called a terrorist for the rest of his life, he will not be allowed to practice journalism again, and Bush will still skate free for what he did in Iraq…
2 B // Mar 15, 2009 at 12:58 pm
I think this whole situation is ridiculous.
1. I have zero knowledge of Iraqi criminal law, so cannot say where this sentence fits in comparison to others. Three years seems harsh to me, but that’s just my opinion.
2. I think there *is* a difference in the fact that he threw his shoes at a visiting Head of State.
3. You don’t do anything that can be perceived as a physical threat to a visiting Head of State. Al-Zeidi’s lucky he didn’t get shot by the President’s protection.
3 mark // Mar 15, 2009 at 1:22 pm
It’s true that he’s lucky he wasn’t subdued much more harshly, but once it was established that he wasn’t a real threat, the penalty should have fit the crime, and in my opinion it didn’t.
I think this is particularly problematic since the Iraqi and U.S. governments are trying to dispel the widely held idea in Iraq that Iraq’s leadership is controlled by Washington, and a harsh penalty like this one seems like it may have the opposite effect.
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