Don't Miss Kingfish's Excellent Analysis of Irby Plea
For anyone who is interested in the Karen Irby guilty plea who does not already read Kingfish’s Jackson Jambalaya blog, you are going to want to read his coverage of the plea here and here. For my money Kingfish is the best reporter in Jackson.
I have read speculation that Karen Irby will likely be sentenced to 10 years in prison. My recollection of sentencing in past vehicular manslaughter cases is that the defendant gets 10–15 years per count. Irby will be lucky if her sentence is only 10 years.
NMC contemplates whether the press coddled Irby because she was rich, white and female. Without question, if this had happened before Karen Irby married Stuart Irby and the victims had not been doctors, there would have been much less press coverage. The Irby family is well known in Jackson to the point of being local celebrities.
Although the family's visible profile does flow from the family's wealth, I suspect that it is the profile that more directly accounts for the coverage than the wealth. I don't think the fact that Irby is white and female had that much to do with the coverage. I remember instances of less press coverage of white females pleading guilty to vehicular homicide.
The press covering famous people differently than everyone else is not unique to Jackson. It is an epidemic in the U.S. in our celebrity loving culture.
The tv media was pretty tough on the case, it was the print media that was soft.