Paris Hilton and KnowledgeMike Rappaport

Since I have a tendency to watch television while doing chores, I have been inundated lately by the Paris Hilton saga.  And it seems to me there is an obvious solution here: Paris Hilton should be treated the same as other people.  In fact, on Fox News, Ann Coulter and  Al Sharpton agreed about that.  They just disagreed about whether she was being favored or harmed because of who she was.

But who can know?  And that is the problem with the coverage about this matter.  There has been largely nonstop coverage of the issue for what seems like weeks now, but I have not seen anything clear about the matter.  What do people, who have committed the assortment of crimes and infractions that Paris has, normally get?  It is ridiculous that the news coverage does not really answer this question.  Presumably, someone knows the answer — how hard is it to find them? 

Another seeming judicial outrage raises the same concerns.  Glenn Reynolds links to this story about a women who, as he correctly puts it, seems to have gotten away with murder.  To read the story is to want to be sick.  A women shoots her husband in the back and kills him, and seems to get away with something like less than a year in a mental institution.  The story notes that the defendant had “testified that her husband was verbally, physically and sexually abusive to her during their 10-year marriage.”  Putting aside my inclination to question her testimony because of her obvious conflict of interest, what we really want to know is, how abusive?   Did he literally torture her and violently rape her, or was he just a real pain the butt to live with?  Even in the former case, I wouldn’t condone the killing, but at least I might understand it and how the jury reacted.  But somehow the story does not say.