The Philadelphia Eagles have released wide receiver Josh Huff following an arrest where he was charged with unlawful possession of weapons, possession of hollow point bullets, and possession of a small amount of marijuana. Head coach Doug Pederson originally said that Huff would remain on the team, but the management ultimately decided he wasn’t worth the trouble.
With the NFL seemingly constantly in the news with reports of domestic abuse and other player violence, is Josh Huff just another spoiled professional athlete who cannot keep himself out of trouble no matter how much it could harm his success?
Based on what we know, I would say that the answer is no. Why is that? Let’s ask this question: What did Huff do that was wrong?
If he had committed robbery, we could say that he stole something. If he had killed someone, we could say that murder is wrong. But what is it about carrying a gun or a certain type of ammunition or a plant? Is there anything wrong with any of that?
The answer, of course, is absolutely not. The problem for Huff is that he was carrying a gun and hollow point bullets in the state of New Jersey, which has some of the strictest (read that as worst) gun laws in the country. He is from Texas, which has very loose gun laws (and even the gun laws in Pennsylvania are not strict relative to New Jersey), so it is completely reasonable to assume that he believed that he was doing nothing illegal.
Unfortunately for Huff, what he was charged with carries a minimum of three and a half years in prison. He crossed an imaginary line (the Pennsylvania/New Jersey border) and he went from being a law abiding citizen to a criminal. You normally have to do something more than that to deserve punishment. Huff did nothing inherently wrong and there is absolutely no argument in saying that he was wrong because he broke the law. If the opposite were true, then it would have been seriously unethical, for example, for Germans to hide Jewish people from the Gestapo.
I hate to assume too much, but Huff should have an advantage over the average person because I imagine that he will be able to afford a high quality lawyer. But isn’t that an unfortunate problem with the system—that whether or not you’re convicted often depends on how much you spend on your lawyer? Or perhaps (and hopefully) the jurors on the case will agree that the New Jersey gun laws are silly and decide to nullify them and grant Huff the not guilty outcome that he deserves.
Huff has a wife and a son. Is it worth it to lock him in a cage and take father away from his son and a husband from his wife?
