Former New York Giants receiver Plaxico Burress began serving his sentence for violating New York’s gun possession laws on Tuesday, after a brief courthouse hearing in which he apologized to his family and was solemnly taken into custody.
“We will all get through this,” Burress said.
Manhattan district attorney Robert Morgenthau — a 90-year-old hard-liner who has held the position since 1975 — pushed for and was able to secure a harsh two-year prison term in a plea deal for Burress, who shot himself in the thigh at a nightclub in November of last year. Had Burress been convicted for carrying an unlicensed weapon and reckless endangerment at trial, he would have faced a 3 1/2-year sentence.
The 32-year-old Burress is expected to spend 20 months in a medium-security prison, before being released on credit of good behavior and then serving two years of probation.
He hopes to return to football once he’s a free man, but by then, he’ll be 34, and it’s unclear if he’ll be reinstated to the NFL, or if any team will take a gamble on him the way the Eagles did on Michael Vick.
Burress’ defense attorney, Benjamin Brafman, called his client a “fundamentally good man who has used bad judgment and is going to pay a very, very severe penalty.”
