Conscience never needs an accomplice.

Donte' Stallworth is a free man. He’s also a bound prisoner. Although his arraignment on DUI manslaughter charges was postponed last week, the Browns receiver is still preparing for an uphill legal battle—which is itself only the opening salvo in a war he’s fated to lose.

Retribution means paying for your sins.

Remorse, on the other hand, means accounting for the debt.

This isn’t a plea for clemency. Stallworth killed a man, and he deserves whatever destiny due process assigns to him. But let’s not confuse social and personal sanction. In a justice system built on Western values, there’s no executioner more merciless than a mind forced to contemplate its own guilt.

Intent is the essence of crime.

Memory is the substance of punishment.

When he’s done serving time in the public spotlight, Stallworth will still be exposed to the eyes in the mirror.

Professional athletes live in a parallel universe. Fame, fortune, freaky-fast cars—it’s an intoxicating mix, an implicit grant of license. The catch, of course, is that a world without consequences is an awfully lonely place. Moralists will argue that Stallworth should suffer for his misdeeds. I’d counter that the evidence on file makes anguish a foregone conclusion.

Penance is hard.

Impunity is harder.

Stallworth may escape the arm of the law, but he’ll never outrun the cops in his head.

Some convictions can’t be overturned. To stop a heart is to face the void; to face the void is to surrender all liberty. The right sentence for Donte' Stallworth is the one he’s living with, and the one he’ll continue to live with for as long as he has life to give. If Stallworth is meaningfully human, his case is already closed. If he isn’t, no court on Earth could ever possibly make his burden any more onerous.

Critics claim that sports stars believe themselves to be above the law, but any Dostoyevsky fan knows how that story ends:

And if only fate would have sent him repentance—burning repentance that would have torn his heart and robbed him of sleep, that repentance, the awful agony of which brings visions of hanging or drowning! Oh, he would have been glad of it! Tears and agonies would at least have been life. But he did not repent of his crime.

Which if nothing else suggests that official opprobrium is utterly beside the point.

Because a mens rea is always its own worst enemy, and every external verdict under heaven only amounts to some judge's toothless just saying, is all...