American swimming superstar Michael Phelps has plead guilty to driving under the influence of alcohol on Friday and was given a one-year suspended prison sentence and 18 months of supervised probation. That probation will end 1 month before the Olympic Games.
Editor’s Note: a suspended sentence means that if Phelps complies with certain other obligations put upon him by the judge, he won’t serve any jail time.
Typically in Maryland, supervised probation means that the guilty must receive permission from their probation officer to leave the state of Maryland.
According to a Tweet from Kristi King of “Washington’s Top News,” Phelps will be allowed to travel out of the country for meets under the terms of his probation. King also Tweeted that Phelps joined Alcoholics Anonymous and completed an intensive rehab program.
#Phelps joined AA and did intensive rehab program. Supervised probation will allow him to travel out of th country #WTOP
— Kristi King (@kingWTOP) December 19, 2014
Phelps does plan to return to competitive swimming after serving a suspension from USA Swimming, according to several reports. He would be eligible for competition again on April 6th, 2015, though the French Swimming Federation has hinted that they expect his competition to come at their World Cup stop later in the year.
Phelps was arrested on September 30th while illegally crossing a line on a bridge and going 80 miles per hour in a 40 mile per hour zone. After being pulled over, Phelps’ Blood Alcohol Content was reportedly measured at .14, almost twice the legal limit to drive in Maryland of .08.
Phelps never denied culpability for the case, and immediately apologized to his fans on Twitter after the news broke. According to more recent posts on his social media account, Phelps is already back in training.
This is Phelps’ second DUI arrest – the first one happened ten years ago when he was 19 in Salisbury, Maryland. In that arrest, he was given 18 months’ probation, fined $250, and was ordered to speak to high school students about drinking and driving.
In that case, he was granted a sentence of probation before judgement, meaning that once he completed the terms of the probation, his record was to be expunged. That time, he blew .08.
Justice has taken it’s course, and a sentence has been passed. The sentence whilst appropriate, looks to be at the more severe end of the spectrum. It does not look like he has received any undue leniency from the court. Unfortunately he has been pre-emptively punished by US swimming and now he has been punished twice. He should be allowed to get on with his chosen profession. Let the man swim and compete. He does not have that much time left on his clock, which makes the US swimming ban even more penal.
The part of this disposition that floors me is the lack of any driving suspension. 1 year minimum up here on a first offence.
Hopefully he learns a valuable lesson and this could be a motivation for him for Rio but then again it’s human nature to fu*k up.
As someone who has lost someone she loves to a drunk driver, I can assure you, people who drive drunk are dangerous criminals. This is not a matter to be made light of.
MP an alcoholic? If he was an alcoholic, there is no way he would be making it to am training sessions and swimming the times he did last summer. I’ve seen full blown alcoholism and they are not training at the elite level by any stretch.
What I think happened is he drank too much at the casino and decided to drive home when he should have called a cab etc……Bad decision.
His AA stuff was probably part of his court deal. Next time call a cab…..
If you’re out on the roads barrelling down the road like a maniac at 84 mph with a BAC of .14%, endangering other people’s lives, you have a problem with alcohol, regardless of how fast you can swim or how often you make it to practice.
Uh-oh looks like people are getting censored…sorry to John and others that were “cut-off” I thought you remarks weren’t that bad 🙂 I’ll tone it down next time…
He might get held up trying to enter Germany too. Here the drinking age is 16 and the driving age is 18. There’s no real alcohol problem and the alcoholics are definitely not anonymous.
Which they will immediately grant because they would be certifiably stupid for turning away the revenue he would bring to that event