How is this NOT a hate crime?

The BBQ Pit
1

At the risk of reiterating my One Trick Pony[sup]TM[/sup] status (and, really, if all you’re going to do is come in to say so, you can kiss my ass), I am much disturbed by this news story.

Two college students in the bathroom. One allegedly is without his glasses and mistakes the other for his roommate and starts talking to him. The other allegedly starts screaming homophobic epithets at him (because he “kept looking at him”) and leaves. He then returns with a baseball bat and beats the first guy with it, all while screaming homophobic epithets. He turns himself in and never denies the attack.

At trial, he is found guilty of assault and battery and sentenced to two 10-year terms to be served concurrently; however, he was found not guilty under Georgia’s hate crimes law, passed in 2000 (this was the first case to invoke the law). It would have added another 10 years to his sentence.

So how, exactly, is he found not guilty of a hate crime? He screams at the guy because he thinks he’s gay, then he comes back and beats him with a baseball bat while screaming that he’s gay.

I particularly loved this gem (not faulting the lawyers for putting up the best defense they could, but it makes no sense to me, although it obviously did to the jury on some level):

How exactly was he “defending himself?” He left the scene, went to his room, got a fucking baseball bat, returned to the scene and beat the guy with it. Since when is a premeditated attack “defending himself?” And how did he not target him for his perceived sexual orientation? That was the reason he was beating him with a baseball bat!

And you know what? I don’t care if the guy offered him a rimjob with a reacharound - this whole fucking “gay panic” defense makes me sick.

I feel for the victim. I feel also for the entire campus, as this man perpetrated an act of terrorism against the safety of every person there, especially those LGBT students. It disgusts me. He should have gotten the extra ten years for robbing that campus of a sense of security.

And the capper (and for anyone who feels the need to chime in with any “special rights” arguments)? By all reports the victim wasn’t gay - he was tried because he was perceived to be gay.

The whole thing makes me sick. Sometimes it feels like nothing has been gained, which I know isn’t true, but it doesn’t make it better for this poor guy and the flaming bigot who attacked him.

Esprix

2

I’d imagine the dumbfucks on the jury thought that since the victim wasn’t really gay then it was really a hate crime; despite the motivation of the attacker.

3

“wasn’t really a hate crime”

4

Just to play devil’s advocate…

Because the victim apparently wasn’t gay, should the prosecutor have even leveled the charge of hate crime? Even though the attacker believed he was gay, wouldn’t it weaken a hate crime law to try someone under this circumstance?

Shouldn’t the hate crime law be reserved for those instances when the victim is a minority of a certain group?

5

Why is this happening in 2003?
I’d thought people had learned something.
Prejudice never dies, i guess…
:frowning: :mad:

6

If a very tanned white person was beaten because someone assumed they were Latino, would it be less of a racially motivated assault?

With you on this Esprix, justice was not served.

7

Anyone know where we could find the wording of the Georgia Hate Crime legislation? Might be good to know if the wording is something like “if you beat a guy for being gay” rather than “if you beat a guy because you think he’s gay” etc.

FWIW, other than from a legal sense I don’t think there’s a whit of difference.

8

Just IMO, it doesn’t matter what the victim is - What matters is what the perp perceives the victim to be and if that perception is a motivating factor in the crime.

But as iampunha suggests, the actual law may think otherwise.

9

First, the devil’s advocate response: From the article about the incident in the Atlanta Journal and Costitution:

The prosecution must prove that Aaron Price attacked his victim solely because he hated a specific trait about him. The law doesn’t mention sexual orientation, sex, race, religous affiliation or anything specific. It’s very vague. His claiming that he really believed he would be sexually assaulted is hard to dispute. We can’t know that he didn’t think that. We can’t know what was going on in that guy’s mind. We may believe that he’s full of shit, but we don’t really know. Additionally, the law was an imperfect compromise to begin with, and tacked on to the end of a budget bill - hence it being vague and uneffective.

However, this may make you feel a little better (or maybe not, because it just illustrates how useless this particular law is). From the same article:

Now, the personal response: I used to argue against hate crime legislation for technical reasons I won’t go into. Some of those still hold, but if this isn’t a hate crime I don’t know what the fuck is. It almost makes me wish we could bring back public floggings.

10

It isn’t a hate crime because supporting that minority isn’t as popular.

11

Here is the relevant legislative language.

The law looks kind of designed to be meaningless. Here’s a newspaper story about problems with it.

12

This was pretty big news around here as the trial went along, as the defendant was the first person to be charged with a hate crime in this state.

It was reported that at the trial the defendant claimed that he did not shout any homophobic slurs. Perhaps the jury believed him. Also, extra craptacular were the defendant’s comments that after he beat the tar out of this kid, “he went to his room and prayed.”
I have really mixed feelings about this trial, as obviously the kid who did this is a fucking dangerous nutjob and I’m glad he’s been taken out of society. I also would have liked for him to get more time. But, because I am opposed to hate-crime legislation, I am happy he was not convicted for that. I guess that if he received the maximum possible sentence for aggravated assault and battery then I am happy with the decision.

13

I will also say it sucks that the two sentences will be carried out concurrently. He deserves the full 20 years, IMHO.

Esprix

14

Definately a hate crime IMO.

15

Yeah, but to be honest, aggravated assault and aggravated battery convictions are almost always penalized concurrently (it’s hard to seperate the two as they usually are regarding a single act). What we have is not so much a travesty of justice, but an ill-written hate crime law. The guy is still going to spend 10 years behind bars, which is a bit more than an assault and battery conviction from something like a bar-fight.

16

Hahahahaha “went to his room and prayed”. Prayed that he was going to get a ten year supply of soap on a rope.
Prayer is the last resort of the scoundrel - Lisa Simpson

17

This is one of the reasons why I think “hate crime” laws are useless. Any violent act is a “hate crime” whether or not the victim was a minority person. We already have well-established degrees for crimes like murder and assault that take motivation and circumstances into account, and I don’t see any purpose to creating a new category of crime for specific classes of victims.

I agree that the guy should have gotten serial instead of concurrent sentences. What a fucker.

18

He probably said the bit about going to his room to pray to get sympathy and “Oh, but he’s a God-fearing young man, let’s cut him some slack” from the jury. I mean, faggot-beating apart, clearly someone who goes away and prays after beating the shit out of someone with a baseball bat while the other person is partially incapacitated has made his peace with God.

:rolleyes:

19

I would guess they didn’t see it as a hate crime because the attack came about in reaction to a percieved situation rather than an intentional attempt to send a message to the gay community as a whole. We don’t have the transcripts of what happened in the courtroom so it’s only a guess. A lot of it would also probably have to do with the purpose of the particular hate crime law. It’s obviously a bias-motivated attack, but was it an attack against the one person or intended to be an attack against all gay people? There is a subtle difference and that may be what the jury percieved.

JOhn.

20

Not to be contradictory, but IMO this doesn’t qualify as a “hate crime.” What he have here is a total fucking lunatic. The homophobia is almost besides the point in the scope of this kind of insanity.