Facial expressions can carry a lot of information.
This is David Salmon at his arraignment. Far from displaying a hint of guilt, shame, or fear of significant punishment, David Salmon's facial expression is a show of anger. All he's thinking about is what he's going to do to his victim when he gets out.
And he will get out.
Thanks to America's sociopath loving, victim blaming culture, David Salmon is going to proudly strut away from this with his shiny peacock feathers spread wide. David Salmon knows that he isn't going to serve any significant prison time for his criminal behavior. Far from it. His lawyer will tell him to hang his head a bit lower, utter a few phony words of apology, and wait for the judge to kiss his hero-of-the-gridiron ass with a suspended sentence. And David Salmon will have no shortage of defenders when he walks out of court. America is lousy with people who will shamelessly defend what he did as a matter of personal and family honor. This is why Timothy McVeigh, the Columbine killers, and a long list of serial criminals too long to post here were able to rationalize the moral acceptibility of what they did. They had too many American role models to count. In terms of character, these bully enablers are indistinguishable from those who once defended the lynching of "uppity" blacks. The demographics of bigots and their victims varies with time and place, but the character of the bigot and those who defend him remains the same.
Every time one of these stories hits the news I hope and pray that this time a learned person of the bench will finally pull his head out of his sociopath loving ass and impose a meaningful sentence. I've been watching and waiting for decades. My prediction that something's gotta break began to be fulfilled in the 1990's when school shootings became headline news. When the Columbine Massacre occured, I naively thought that Americans would finally lose their tolerance for bullying. I was wrong. The average American, particularly those who are enthralled by violent athletes couldn't give a damn about the lives and safety of victims as long as someone else's son or daughter is being brutalized. Apparently it's easy for Americans to rationalize that the alleged victim had it coming.
The next time some adult survivor of community sanctioned brutality sprays bullets into a crowd or parks a truck bomb under a daycare center, think about the Americans who raised David Salmon to believe that brutality is acceptible behavior, the Americans who shamelessly shower praise upon violent young men, and the Americans who allowed David Salmon to strut out of court with a suspended sentence.
He's going to get off easy, and the world's terrorists will have one more example of American morality to learn from.
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