Posted on 06/23/2006 3:03:42 PM PDT by ConservativeStatement
BATON ROUGE -- Clifford "The Black Rhino" Etienne entered the final round donning an orange and white jumpsuit, awaiting the judge's decision.
Standing between wood-paneled walls and under courtroom lighting -- the antithesis of the ringside glitz friends say he soaked up excessively, perhaps to this end -- the fighter's bounce was gone, his expression beaten, as the hard time for crimes he committed flowed like a blistering combination to the gut -- - 50 years, 5 years, 20 years.
Once the shining example of correctional reform and rehabilitation, a former convict turned lucrative heavyweight prizefighter and ranked contender, Etienne's rags-to-ring tale came full circle Thursday. Convicted of several charges resulting from his involvement in an Aug. 10, 2005, criminal incident, which included two counts of armed robbery, two counts of second-degree kidnapping, two counts of attempted manslaughter and attempted carjacking, District Judge Wilson Fields sentenced Etienne, 34, to serve 160 years in a Department of Corrections facility without the possibility of parole.
(Excerpt) Read more at nola.com ...
Well, for every success story out of prison like a Bernard Hopkins, there's a Clifford Etienne who couldn't get the past out of his life. A million dollars, a golden opportunity, and he threw it all away. Sad, but he made his choices, and now he lives with them.
}:-)4
Committed not long after his two devastating losses (both 3rd round stoppages) in early '05 to journeyman Calvin Brock and Russian (7 ft.) giant Nicolay Valuev. Couldn't handle defeat, so went back to his old profession (crime).
From the link below:
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=1006033033807
There are two types of manslaughter and according to the law, both are unplanned.
Voluntary manslaughter or nonnegligent manslaughter, is killing in a heated moment (not planned), and in usually provoked by the victim.
Involuntary manslaughter is the wrongful unplanned killing of another person.
So the only way to "attempt" manslaughter would be if you were in the act of committing a heat of the moment murder and were interrupted or stopped while in the midst of the act. For example: road rage, beating someone with a baseball bat but stopped short of killing that person by a cop or bystander. You were so enraged, you would have killed the person in the heat of the moment but were stopped by others...the intent was there, the completion was not.
At approximately 6:30 p.m. on Aug. 10, 2005, police officers arrested Etienne after he held up a Baton Rouge check-cashing business and fled the premises with nearly $2,000 taken from a register drawer. During Etienne's attempted escape, the former fighter carjacked a motorist using a 9mm handgun and also unsuccessfully fired at officers because his gun malfunctioned twice.
He's back where he belongs to be.
What sounds a bit odd about this one is that the people he attempted to shoot (in the heat of the moment) were police officers. I always thought that killing an officer was automatically first degree murder, so I'd think this should be 'attempted 1st degree murder'. (Of course, there's probably a reason why I'm not a lawyer...)
One might argue that he remains a shining example of today's style of correctional reform and rehabilitation - heavy emphasis on style over substance.
In a related story, John Kerry spoke a sentence that took 160 years...
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