Swiftly now to acting’s Mark Wahlberg, who makes an audacious bid for the Paris Hilton Chair of Celebrity Jurisprudence.
Mark is erstwhile of the Funky Bunch, of course, and most recently of the Transformers franchise, having stolen our hearts – and our neurons – in the critically misunderstood Age of Extinction.
But now, he wants to sign up as a real-life reserve police officer with the LAPD. Why? Perhaps he has been inspired by Lost in Showbiz untouchable Steven Seagal, who, you will recall, has worked as a reserve officer in the Louisiana police. Perhaps he’s having a midlife crisis. Perhaps he just thinks the LAPD needs more stardust in its world. Actually, hang on: looking at the document, he thinks it will make “troubled youths … see this as an inspiration and motivation that they, too, can turn their lives around”.
Anyway, it’s a little known fact that to be a cop in America you need to carry a gun – and unfortunately, Mark isn’t allowed to handle guns. He has a felony assault conviction dating back to 1988, you see, having partially blinded a man in the course of a robbery, during which he deployed various racist slurs.
Clearly, this really dicks around with his plans to catch bad guys in order to inspire kids with no other access to hope, and who could really use a formerly racist white guy becoming a cop at this particular time in America’s journey.
So to this end, Mark has requested a pardon from the state of Massachusetts. His petition is quite something, not least a passage that I beg you not to consider as bordering on the petulant.
“Why isn’t it enough that I have personally risen above my past,” he demands, “found success in Hollywood, have served as a local and national philanthropist and am the father of four beautiful children with my incredible wife?”
Why indeed? Flicking through my United States Code, I see that the law does take the aesthetic charms of one’s offspring into account when considering misdemeanour assaults, but there is no precedent for it being brought to bear on felony assaults. Having said that, the hotness of the wife could be the game changer for Mark: there is a wealth of case law suggesting that anything above a seven can neuter even an aggravated assault – the so-called “Eight-for-an-eye” clause.
Frankly, if Mark doesn’t get what he wants off the governor of Massachusetts, I hope he goes all the way to the supreme court with this one. There in Washington, the beautiful children and the incredible wife shall be produced to the stunned gasps of all the nine justices, who immediately rule that anyone who reasons in the way Wahlberg does should absolutely be given firearms and empowered to discharge them whenever he sees fit.
