This past week, Q-line asked: What should Lindsay Lohan receive as punishment for her numerous brushes with the law? Here are your responses: “LINDSAY LOHAN SHOULD BE CHARGED, tried and sentenced just like any other law-breaker. Her celebrity status shouldn’t enter into it at all if she keeps flaunting the law, because she thinks she can manipulate her way out of the charges and the penalties. You or I — or one of our loved ones — would be just as dead if she ran into us as if Joe or Jane Blow hit us.”
“PARIS HILTON AND NICOLE RICHIE should do 2,000 days in a women’s facility. They have no right to be out drinking and driving. Even though they are celebrities, they should be treated like everybody else. They should get the full extent of the law.”
“THOSE MOTORISTS WHO ARE ARRESTED while driving under the influence of alcohol are seldom incarcerated due to the extraordinary amount of DUI arrests made on an annual basis. There would not be enough jailhouses to house them and it would create an enormous negative cash flow for the judicial bureaucracy. Lindsay Lohan drinking alcohol to excess is not her problem; her problem is why does she drink alcohol to excess? A question that would be best answered by a psychiatrist. Still, there are laws in place for the Lindsay Lohans of the world. Due to jail being a punishment and not a cure, a stiff fine and suspension of driving privileges is in order for Miss Lohan. She will then have to hire a driver to escort her to the various saloons on her path to both physical and career destruction. Good-bye, Lindsay, we hardly knew ya.”
“THEY SHOULD GIVE HER THE SAME punishment (as someone) who isn’t famous. If it means doing a year or two in prison, fine, she deserves it. As far as drunk drivers are concerned, whether they’re famous or not, once they are convicted of drunk driving, their cars should be impounded and auctioned and they don’t get the money. They should have their licenses revoked, and if they’re caught driving another car, they go to jail and that car is seized. And if they kill someone while drunk driving, they should be executed for murder, because that’s what it is — it’s not an accident it’s murder.”
“LINDSAY SHOULD BE LOCKED UP FOR about a month in general population, and when she gets out, she’s not allowed to drive a car or own a car in the state of California for 10 years. She needs to be made an example of.”
“THE RICH AND FAMOUS SHOULD BE treated equally under the law with the poor and homeless. However, we were supposed to be a free country, but along the way some hypocritical puritanical prudes first tried making alcohol illegal. Then they made pot and coke illegal — although most of our nation’s founding fathers grew pot. This evil “war on drugs” has ruined more lives than all of our wars combined and is costing us unbelievable trillions of dollars. Prohibitions against murder, rape and robbery were part of our heritage from the Bible. Smoking and consuming whatever we wished was not considered a sin or wrong. Of course, some restrictions could be made for driving intoxicated, but otherwise, the possession and use of any substance should be legal — whether you’re Paris Hilton or Joe the bum.”
“LINDSAY LOHAN SHOULD BE CONFINED to riding back and forth on the Big Blue Bus system. If standing shoulder-to-shoulder with the matriculates of Santa Monica’s rehab industry doesn’t scare Lindsay into sobriety, nothing will.”
“I THINK THAT LINDSAY LOHAN NEEDS to do her time. She’s not better than anyone else, so yes, she needs to do her time and maybe she’ll learn something... I hope.”
“LINDSAY LOHAN SHOULD RECEIVE a sentence of living a year in Santa Monica, preferably in low-income housing. She would need to study the two dominant languages — Spanish and Yiddish — to communicate with her new neighbors, thereby causing a change in her class thinking. She should be required to attend all City Council, school district and SMC meetings. This would create a new attitude of hardening her against the mind-numbing platitudes of city bureaucrats. She should be required to find a new parking spot for her BMW every day, but like the rest of us, soon be forced to take public transportation. This would allow her to use her new language skills. She should be required to ride a bicycle, forcing her to be reminded of the invention of the wheel. After her sentence, when she is in a café on the Champs d’Elysees sipping a caramel macchiato, she will be able to reflect on her sentence. First, no one died because of her drunken rampage; two, with her God-given talent, she can make millions of dollars, allowing her to bypass the middle class mules slugging against the socialist bureaucracy; third, she won’t have to love Santa Monica.”
“LINDSAY LOHAN SHOULD RECEIVE AS punishment things that really matter. Cut her nails down so she can’t use them as scoopers for the coke. Obviously, rehab is just a stay at a country club, so that’s not going to work, unless you send her to a nasty rehab. Secondly, take away all her mirrors, all her brushes and all her makeup. Vanity comes before a fall. Because she was voted the hottest woman by Maxim magazine this year and because she is very hot, she is probably obsessed with herself. And a lot of girls know that when you take a lot of drugs you don’t feel hungry. And then you get thinner, and then you feel sexier, and then you get more obsessed with yourself. It’s “Sex, drugs, I love me, sex, I love me!” I’m 47 years old but I remember what it was like to be firm, 21, hot and everybody wants you.
Lindsay, snap out of it. Someone needs to slap her in the face, take away her coke spoon and all her accessories. No more purses — flip-flops only. Degrade her vanity and ego.”
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on August 4, 2007. Read the original PDF.