donlever wrote: ↑Wed Feb 04, 2026 8:31 pm
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One of my boys tells me last night that McKenna's been charged with felony assault.
This was sort of ambiguous, given that "assault" is often the term used in the headline of a sex-related offense or domestic violence offense and he didn't have any of those details.
If McKenna's assault is as described above, I don't think it will have a long term impact on his career, and in some ways, my estimation for him has increased. The "if as described above" is doing a lot of work here and there is a full story of events that might not read so clean, but if your mom is getting called slurs and attempts to diffuse the situation with less force (certainly if the bar had a bouncer he would have been privileged to forcibly remove the patron), you punch the guy until he's down or slithers away. Bieska's parking lot take down of Federov had less noble cause (but within a code), and its the thing that convinced Burke to sign him.....
If the events are as described and especially if there's more relating to the aggressiveness of the harassing patron, there is a good "defense of others" argument here, which is an affirmative defense. When you use non lethal force, battery is justified if you have a reasonable belief another faces harm and the force used is reasonable/proportional. Decking a guy in this scenario arguably qualifies, especially where the fact pattern involves unsuccessful attempts to de-escalate prior to the punch being thrown. [EDIT ADD: We have a concept in American law called "fighting words," which was part of the First Amendment case law for a long time (and sort of still is) which basically says that you don't have a free speech right to engage in fighting words -- words that, basically, would cause even a reasonable person to hit you. As an "exception" to the First Amendment, the doctrine allowed a little more berth to law enforcement to arrest for "speech only" disorderly conduct. But at its core, I think the idea is that there are some kinds of speech that create a reasonable risk of physical harm -- not because "words are violence themselves," but because the purpose of communicating the words is to express an intent that hitting is next (a threat) or is an invitation to be hit/get in a fight. In other words, repeatedly calling a guy's mom a vulgar or profane word is doing the same thing as "let's take this outside" and we all *know* this to be true.]
And if its not perfect self-defense/defense of others (or the prosecutor isn't sure how the jury will go), it is almost certainly the case that the prosecutor pleads down. New reports have three charges filed presumably for the exact same incident; there are places to go down.
And defense of others or not, there really have to be a number of other facts at play that aren't in these tweets to think that aggravated assault is anything other than an overcharge. That required an intent to do serious bodily injury -- so you need to have something aggravating beyond what't described -- use of a weapon (like a bottle), punching him in the face when he's prone, maybe a complete out of nowhere sucker punch, continuing to punch when the person is unable to fight back. It isn't uncommon for police to book on the most serious charges for which there is probable cause and for the prosecution to charge the most serious offenses it can based on the police reports, but its often just to anchor a better negotiating position or before there's a full understanding of the likelihood of a conviction for that charge given further evaluation of the case, new information, assessing witness credibility, etc.