By all reasonable accounts, Kia Roberts is highly experienced with investigating domestic violence. A graduate of both Duke University and Vanderbilt Law School, Roberts spent the first seven years of her career, before joining the NFL's investigatory team, as a prosecutor of domestic violence and sexual assault cases for the Brooklyn District Attorney's Office. In this capacity, Roberts played a key role in the "investigation and prosecution of hundreds of cases," according to her LinkedIn profile.
Nevertheless, when NFL commissioner Roger Goodell recently decided to suspend Ezekiel Elliott for six games based on allegations of domestic violence, Goodell eschewed Roberts's independent judgment that there was insufficient evidence to punish the Dallas Cowboys running back, in favor of the far harsher judgment of NFL higher-ups who were less directly involved in the investigation.
Goodell's decision to punish Elliott, despite the seeming objection of the league's well-trained independent investigator, marks yet another potential mishap in the league's maligned player investigation process ― one that seems to regularly defy traditional legal norms. Indeed, in a society that has long maintained a judicial practice that it is better to allow a guilty man to walk free than subject an innocent man to punishment, the NFL's iconoclastic jurisprudence under Goodell seems to invert this important presumption of innocence.
Beyond these oddities, there are also irregularities in the NFL's investigative process with respect to interpreting factual ambiguity. The notion of suspending a professional athlete despite equivocal evidence contradicts the longstanding judicial norms described by many of professional sports' most revered dispute arbitrators. For example, in a famous 1992 Major League Baseball grievance arbitration, the case's esteemed arbitrator, George Nicolau, explained that "deterrence, however laudable an objective, should not be achieved at the expense of fairness." The NFL does not seem to apply this edict.
One of many characteristics that sets Goodell apart from revered sports arbitrators, neutral or otherwise, is that he lacks formal legal training. Whereas Nicolau attended Columbia Law School and spent many years as a practicing attorney before being selected to arbitrate Major League Baseball player disputes, Goodell's only diploma beyond high school is an undergraduate degree from Washington and Jefferson College. It does not require much imagination to recognize that having formal legal training can be important, if not necessary, to effectuating a reasonable player discipline process.
Like Nicolau, Kia Roberts has a traditional legal education and experience, which likely influenced the more skeptical light in which she viewed the evidence related to Elliott and reached the conclusion against his suspension.
One interesting side note in the Elliott case is that according to Judge Mazzant's legal opinion, one of Roberts's higher-ups, Lisa Friel (herself an esteemed lawyer and graduate of the University of Virginia Law School), seems to have concluded that there was sufficient evidence to suspend Elliott. However, according to this same decision, Friel had met privately with Goodell and the league's lawyers, outside the presence of Roberts ― even though Roberts was the only NFL official to have interviewed Elliott's accuser.
For people who want to believe there is at least some integrity to the NFL investigative process, they should hope that Friel, in the role of Roberts's direct supervisor, had an earnest disagreement in professional judgment about the evidence against Elliott ― not that she faced pressure from higher-ups to reach a different conclusion from Roberts. To date, this issue does not seem to be addressed in the court's opinions.
As the NFL's internal process for investigating and punishing alleged wrongdoing by players is already under the microscope, any further deviations from following a traditional investigative process would only make the league's judicial process appear more suspect. Indeed, for a sport that wants to be known as America's national pastime, it is critically important to internally follow American judicial norms.
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Marc Edelman (Marc@MarcEdelman.com) is a Professor of Law at Baruch College’s Zicklin School of Business and the founder of Edelman Law, where he practices in the areas of sports, antitrust, gaming and intellectual property law. He is also the author of "Are Commissioner Suspensions Really Any Different from Illegal Group Boycotts?"
