Google me: Boxers have a long history of legal knock-outs

By AMANDA CAMERON

Boxing New Zealand decided this week that convicted criminal Soulan Pownceby can represent New Zealand in the Athens Olympics.

The amateur boxer was jailed in 1995 for the manslaughter of his 5-month-old daughter and has four assault convictions.

So is Pownceby a rarity or do boxers have a tendency to run foul of the law?

Googling the search string "boxer convicted" brought up a total of 27,600 hits. (Mind you, there were 253,000 hits for "teacher convicted").

There were the notorious cases, of course.

Encarta details how heavyweight boxing champion Mike Tyson was convicted in 1992 of raping an 18-year-old woman and sentenced to 10 years in prison.

Blog site Hot Boxing News chronicles pages of other "Bad Boy Boxers" in trouble for anything from passing bad cheques to drug trafficking, rape and murder.

Floyd "Jumbo" Cummings was sentenced to life in 1992 after a series of crimes including murder and armed robbery. Heavyweight boxer Jeff Simms learned how to box in prison while serving a sentence for manslaughter.

Interestingly, the lighter weight boxers seemed to weigh in with lighter charges.

Pan-Asian Boxing Association light middleweight champion Shannon Taylor almost bit the nose off a real estate agent in a brawl in Sydney in 2002, according to Hot Boxing News.

RTE News reports that former Northern Ireland World Flyweight Boxing Champion Dave McCauley pleaded guilty to passing forged sterling notes this month.

There were many instances of boxers wrongly convicted.

One of the most famous was Rubin "Hurricane" Carter. In 1985, the former middleweight boxer - convicted twice of a triple murder in 1966 - was released from Rahway State Prison, according to boxing-forum.co.uk. A judge ruled that Carter had been denied his civil rights by prosecutors during trials in 1967 and 1976. His case was made famous by a Bob Dylan song.

Heavyweight champion Henry Tillman, who won gold against Mike Tyson in the 1984 Olympics, served six years for murder but still maintains his innocence, says Boxing Monthly.

And, according to the Advocate, Isaac Knapper won a bronze medal in the Olympic boxing trials in Barcelona, Spain, within a year of being released from prison after a murder conviction was overturned.

He had a long juvenile criminal record included two armed robberies, and was back in prison in 1999 serving 20 years for trafficking cocaine.