I think we should not discount the likelihood that none of the players face criminal consequences because none of the players were actually involved in a crime. The amount of credibility accorded to police reports by the general public continues to astound me. You have a huge crowd of pissed off, drunk and confused teenagers/20-somethings, all yelling and trying to tell "their story", and a few cops trying to write down everyone's version at once while their priorities are:

1) protect any victims who might be injured,
2) protect the crowd from each other,
3) protect themselves,
4) disperse the crowd without further violence, and finally

.
.
.

5) investigate what actually occurred

The investigation is a distant last place on their priority list on the scene. They have so many and so much more important things to worry about, there is essentially zero effort put into vetting, verifying or even questioning any particular "witnesses" account. They're just writing down what everyone says at the moment, with hardly any regard to the credibility of the source.

I have personally witnessed a police report on a fight recording that four witnesses identified a guy as the culprit, when that guy was in fact sitting in a bar (next to me) two blocks away when the fight happened and all four witnesses (as they confirmed again in court) attempted to explain to the officer that they were identifying was an entirely different guy in "a green shirt and white hat." But the cop had looked up, seen a guy in a green shirt and white hat, and was not interested in listening to anything else.

We don't know jack at this point. None of us, not even the people who were there (much less the dozens of posters who will surely claim to have "been there"). It is sad (though in our society -- and among the lowlifes frequenting this board especially -- inevitable) how quickly and with such certainty we condemn the accused, when we are already conditioned to assume they are guilty.

As far as predicting how it plays out, that's sheer folly unless you are Nathan Fisher or the DA. No one else has nearly enough information about the case to make even a vague estimation. Lots of people thought Ray Lewis was going to jail forever and that Plaxico would be back on the field as quickly as his leg could heal. None of us really knows anything (and probably never will really know).