Prosecutor's office: Correct decision
The office in charge of deciding whether to prosecute former Baltimore Ravens running back Ray Rice in a domestic abuse case defended its decision Tuesday.
"Mr. Rice received the same treatment by the criminal justice system in Atlantic County that any first-time offender has, in similar circumstances," Jay McKeen, a spokesman for the Atlantic County prosecutor's office, told ABC News.
"The decision was correct."
The Atlantic County prosecutor's office offered Rice "pretrial intervention" in May. Rice had been charged with aggravated assault, but the year-long pretrial program -- if completed -- would allow Rice to ask the court to erase his record. Rice applied for the program, was recommended for it, and the prosecutor's office agreed.
Monday, acting Atlantic County prosecutor Jim McClain issued a statement saying that his office approved Rice's request for New Jersey's pretrial intervention program "after careful consideration of the information contained in Mr. Rice's application in light of all of the facts gathered during the investigation."
To enter the program, Rice paid the Superior Court of New Jersey a $125 enrollment fee for one year. He was ordered to attend and complete anger management counseling in Maryland.
According to a representative of the probation division, Rice has attended weekly counseling sessions prior to entering the program on May 20. The counselor, a licensed clinical therapist, confirmed Rice's continuing compliance with the program with a representative of the probation division Tuesday afternoon.
The prosecutor's office wasn't the only one facing scrutiny Tuesday, a day after TMZ.com released a video showing Rice hitting his then-fiancee Janay Palmer (now Janay Rice) in the face, knocking her to the ground in an Atlantic City hotel elevator. The NFL repeated Tuesday that authorities did not make the video available to the league, saying in a statement: "We requested from law enforcement any and all information about the incident, including any video that may exist. We spoke to members of the New Jersey State Police and reached out multiple times to the Atlantic City Police Department and the Atlantic County prosecutor's office. That video was not made available to us and no one in our office saw it until yesterday."
In an earlier statement Tuesday, the NFL said its understanding was that security at Atlantic City casinos is handled by the state police. In response to inquiries from ABC News, the state police said the statement from the league is not accurate.
"Investigations of incidents on the casino floor are handled by the NJSP, but this occurred in the elevator and was handled by the [Atlantic City Police Department]," an NJSP spokesman said. "We never had the video."
Sources connected with the Revel Hotel and Casino told TMZ that no one from the NFL asked the since-closed casino for the video of the couple in the elevator from the Feb. 15 incident. Instead, the league apparently relied on previously released video that showed Rice dragging his then-fiancee from the elevator before determining that Rice would serve a two-game suspension.
A source at NFL headquarters told ESPN's Josina Anderson that they didn't think anyone at the NFL had seen the video. "I know they didn't see it simply because ... If Jeff Miller, our head of NFL security, says they didn't see that tape before they did, then I believe him," the source said. "Jeff is a man of high character. That's what I picked up from internal conversations. So I'm good with that."
A Revel spokesman told ABC News that the casino did make a copy of the elevator surveillance video for police.
A spokesman for the New Jersey state attorney general responded to questions about why the video was not released to the NFL.
"It's grand jury material. It would have been improper -- in fact, illegal -- for the Atlantic County Prosecutor's Office to provide it to an outside/private/non law-enforcement entity," Paul Loriquet said, according to ABC News.
Also Tuesday, Vice President Joe Biden said violence against women is the ugliest form of violence there is. He's calling it a stain on America's national character that must be exposed and eliminated. Biden was speaking out at a ceremony marking the 20th anniversary of the Violence Against Women Act.
He also said that victims can't fully recover until there's a conviction. He said he'll convene a summit aimed at finding ways to allow survivors to sue their abusers in federal court. The Supreme Court struck down that provision of the Violence Against Women Act.
Earlier Tuesday, Biden told NBC that the NFL did the right thing by indefinitely suspending Rice.
And NFL commissioner Roger Goodell, who initially suspended Rice for two games before issuing an indefinite suspension on Monday, received an endorsement from New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft on Tuesday.
"The way he has handled this situation himself, coming out with the mea culpa in his statement a couple of weeks ago, or 10 days ago, and setting a very clear policy of how we conduct ourselves in the NFL I thought was excellent," Kraft said on "CBS This Morning."
"Anyone who is second-guessing that doesn't know him."
