A Louisiana district attorney announced Monday that he would not prosecute two football players at the University of Alabama simply because they are athletes.
According to a police report obtained by ESPN, a police officer approached Alabama players Cam Robinson and Laurence "Hootie" Jones in a Louisiana park last month and smelled marijuana. The report said the officer could see a bag of marijuana and a handgun, and a stolen handgun was found under the seat of the car. Both players were arrested.
Ouachita Parish District Attorney Jerry Jones is now dropping the charges, citing insufficient evidence to prove who had the gun and drugs, KNOE reported.
But Jones didn't stop there. In an interview with KNOE, he emphasized that the "main reason" he was dropping charges didn't have as much to do with the law as it did with the fact the men were athletes.
"I want to emphasize once again that the main reason I'm doing this is that I refuse to ruin the lives of two young men who have spent their adolescence and teenage years, working and sweating, while we were all in the air conditioning," he said.
Jones' decision to drop the case comes at a time when there has been much focus on the disciplinary leniency given to college athletes. Earlier this month, Brock Turner, a star swimmer at Stanford received just a six-month jail sentence for raping a woman. Last month, Baylor fired its football coach for the way the team handled sexual assault allegations against players.
ESPN reported that Alabama's coach, Nick Saban, hasn't announced any punishment against the two players because he wants to find out more about what happened.
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