DMX blaring his new single Slippin’ in the courtroom didn’t seem to help him as much as he would have liked as he was sentenced to 1 year in jail for tax fraud. It could have been worse however as he could have been facing five years for not paying his taxes. Had his legal team not brought up his past and the hard life he’d lived as a youth things might have gone a lot worse. However it’s still message to those that would seek to cheat the government out of its money that star power doesn’t mean that people can cheat on their taxes without consequence. Unfortunately this message seems to land on ears that burning with embarrassment for the way the legal system is handled.
The explanation for that is simple. If the government doesn’t get their money then a person will eventually take it’s due in some form be it restitution or jail time. Yet when it comes to those that do even worse crimes the punishments are often far less severe or non-existent. The workings of the legal system in the United States absolutely take star power into account and the amount of money that a person can pay. The mention of one’s childhood and how they were raised often comes into play as well, excusing what people do as adults and making them sound more like the victim despite the fact that they are now grown, free-thinking individuals that can make their own decisions that aren’t based on their upbringing. The argument of course to stymie this line of thinking would be that a person knows how to react to the world around them based on how they’re raised and how they are taught to perceive the world.
Another argument to stymie that however is that once a person is integrated into the world as an adult they have choices to make, and the number of choices that are there to be made will not all be dependent on how they were raised. There are enough celebrities in the world today that have endured hard childhoods and less than adequate upbringings that have become good, honest, and upstanding citizens that know the difference between right and wrong. Whether or not DMX chose the right path is all on him, not on his past. The practice of using one’s past as a defense or a crutch is kind of deplorable given that it makes them the victim rather than the responsible adult that knew just what they were doing. It’s almost as bad as copping an insanity plea when they were in their right mind the whole time.
DMX will spend the next year in prison for tax fraud, and in all likelihood he could be out before then since that seems to be how the system works. He’ll also be ordered to pay back $2.2 million in restitution. Hopefully this will be the last time he has to learn this lesson, as it would be one that no one would want to repeat.
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