Nick Diaz has four days to get 22,000 signatures for his White House petition

Nick Diaz and legal team

Nick Diaz has four days to find some sort of justice with a White House petition.

The popular UFC veteran is about 22,000 signatures shy of a 100,000 cutoff needed to get an official response from this country’s highest office. The petition closes Friday.

This past month, the Nevada State Athletic Commission suspended Diaz (27-9 MMA, 7-7 UFC) for five years following his third pot infraction, which came after a decision loss to Anderson Silva (34-6 MMA, 17-2 UFC) at UFC 183. The punishment prompted huffs of outrage from the MMA community and celebrity supporters, including Cher.

Diaz’s legal team plans an appeal, which could put him in limbo for several months.

But almost as soon as the ink dried on one of the harshest punishments handed down to an MMA fighter, the petition was underway. Created by “T.C.” from Boaz, Ala., on Sept. 14 – the same day of Diaz’s suspension – it quickly garnered in excess of 60,000 signatures over two weeks before slowing down a tad.

Diaz has 77,469 signatures as of this writing, making his petition the fourth most popular on the White House’s petition website (a few other noble causes trump Stockton, Calif.’s native son). While he awaits his legal fate, he plans to put on his gi and train jiu-jitsu, according to his longtime coach.

Diaz shouldn’t expect a presidential pardon, no more than “Star Wars” fans should expect the White House to build a Death Star. It’s impossible to predict whether the Oval Office will take the issue seriously enough to take real action on the matter or merely issue a statement urging action from Congress.

Still, it’s probably better than nothing.

“You never know what the effect of grassroots campaigns like this will have,” Diaz attorney Lucas Middlebrook recently told MMAjunkie. “But certainly they can only help, if not in the judicial sense, then at least to draw attention to the inequity involved in the process.”

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