Reading the newspapers today, I was pleasantly surprised to discover that Rick Vaive, the former team captain of the Toronto Maple Leafs, was found innocent of driving under the influence of alcohol. In court, Mr Vaive related the touching story of his life---a story that many, including myself, would not relay to our best friends, let alone in open court. The police arrested a man who, allegedly, had been walking erratically and needed help with his papers upon being pulled over, and to top it off had urinated on himself. A police station video showed none of this behaviour.
Mr Vaive has had bladder-control issues since he was six; he also suffers from sleep apnea, a disease wherein the brain suffers from oxygen deprivation during the hours of sleep, leading to next-day drowsiness. The arresting officer said that Mr Vaive was slow to react, needed help in walking, had bloodshot eyes, had a wet stain at the crotch, and smelled of alcohol. The first five are easy to account for, given Mr Vaive's sleep apnea and urinary leakage; the last, however, is quite a mystery.
Personally, I think that the arresting constable did the same as many witnesses do in court: when faced with an incomplete picture, one tends to "fill in" the ostensibly missing information. For instance, when presented with the scene before and after a car crash, without the actual crash being shown, many people will attempt to piece together the missing information. This is what I feel happened, unwittingly, to the constable.
It is completely possible that Mr Vaive, as he claimed, was tired and not drunk. Tiredness, in fact, can cause identical, although far more severe, impairment in drivers to alcohol.
Yet the Toronto Sun, an otherwise respectable right-of-centre tabloid newspaper, saw fit to run a sensationalist screed that insinuated that Mr Vaive was lying, acquitted solely because of his top-notch counsel. Michele Mandel, the authoress of this so-called article (I could wipe my arse with it after taking my usual toilet-plugging dump, for all the good it does) ought to check what her species is, because Homo sapiens wouldn't write this kind of thing... although Canis lupus would. That's right, Mrs Mandel, I'm calling you a bitch. Mrs Mandel even writes that, by winning, Mr Vaive lost out on his public image, and that "a different scenario... would have done wonders for his image: where the former hockey hero faces the cameras and says he shouldn't drink and drive". How is that even possible? If people who won cases like this lost out on their public image, and those that pled guilty (despite their obvious innocence) gained it, stars would be lining up to plead guilty.
Maybe Mrs Mandel is just jealous; she writes yellow journalism for a second-rate rag, and likely doesn't have the money to eat, let alone hire a lawyer. Maybe she's just plain old pre-menstrual. Whatever it is, these are not the writings of a sane woman. Read them yourself: http://tinyurl.com/vaive.
