With all due respect, I would feel safer than Esprix in a room with this nutjob. If he had percieved me to be “sexually harassing” him, his response would have been quite different.
Hate crime.
I know it’s another debate entirely, but it just doesn’t make sense that if the victim of this case was gay than the attacker would have gotten double the sentance.
If the victim was in fact gay, even if all of the other facts of the case were the same, then Price would have been charged with a hate crime, IMO. That means 20 years instead of 10.
It’s bad to beat someone with a baseball bat. But, it’s really, really bad to beat someone who is gay with a baseball bat. :rolleyes:
I think Scylla’s point is that you really have no idea what else might set this guy off. If he is willing to beat a person with a baseball bat for peeking into the shower at him, God knows what a woman might do to trigger violence.
And, with all due respect, how do you know that his response to being “sexually harassed” by a woman would be different? As I said, maybe he has a tiny dick, and he would feel the need to beat you with a bat if you saw it.
This is an unstable and dangerous person. I would not feel safe in assuming that his violence was going to be confined to any one group of people.
Regards,
Shodan
Yes, it shows that he’s not a mad howling wolf with thick red mist obscuring his eyesight. I hate the perpetrator of this crime too, but to flatly deny that he’s going to suffer is just stupid.
The perpetrator is 19. So he was probably a freshman. First time away from home. Maybe the first time he has to shower with strangers. He is going to an all male school, for whatever reasons, but I’m sure some of his HS friends teased him about going there and told him that an all male school would ‘be full of fags and they’ll probably jump you in the shower’. I know if I told my friends my senior year in HS that I was going to an all male school that is what they would have said to me.
So here is this KID and he’s a small kid so he has probably been picked on quite a bit in his life and when he feels the most vulnerable someone a foot taller pokes his head into his shower stall and he freaks out and commits a felony. He is now going to jail where a 5 foot 2 inch tall 19-year-old will probably have a pretty rough time of things.
It seems that the actual law is flawed. So that might be the reason the jury didn’t convict. Then again this is the first case so the public (the jury) may not be ready to convict on this type of crime.
Is this justice? I don’t know. I don’t know how badly the victim was beaten. One of the articles says he suffered from a fractured skull but we don’t know if he is permanently disabled or is he going to be physically fine. That would be a factor in the length of his prison stay.
Yes he did. If Price hadn’t thought Love was gay, he wouldn’t have attacked him. But he did believe Love was gay, and based on that conclusion he attacked Love. In other words, Price beat Love because he thought Love was gay. Moreover, it wasn’t a spontaneous assault; he left the room, sought out a weapon, and returned. He sought Love out to beat him up.
The fact that this twit Price thought he was being “harassed” doesn’t change the fact that Love’s perceived homosexuality was a motive for the assault. And the fact that Price hasn’t beaten up more people doesn’t imply that this wasn’t a hate crime.
Bad analogies, both of them. In your hypothetical domestic assault, there’s no reason to assume that the victim’s sexual orientation wasn’t a motive. Likewise, there’s no reason to assume that Love’s poor vision was a motive for the assault that actually happened. But there’s ample reason to believe that Price’s belief that Love was gay was a motive for Price’s assault.
I don’t know any more than you know his response would be the same. But your assertion – that Price was motivated solely by a fear of harassment – assumes that his response would be the same. My assertion – that Price was motivated by his perception of Love’s sexual orientation – is, on the other hand, supported by the facts. One more time: Price wouldn’t have assaulted Love if he hadn’t thought Love was gay. Price’s own stated motives support this conclusion.
He went to his room, found a weapon, came back, and assaulted somebody. I have very little sympathy for this turd Price. He could have “freaked out” just as easily by going to his room and staying there, or maybe calling his mother and whining about about all the big bad people who are looking at him! But he chose to beat up a guy with a fucking baseball bat. Prison is exactly what he deserves.
I don’t know about you, but all my freaking out is done on the spur of the moment. This guy left the shower room, went to his room, got a baseball bat, returned, and beat the shit out of the other guy with it. That’s not a freakout, that’s a premeditated crime.
Well, I know this puts me out of step with my gay brethren, but it seems to me that reason for the assault is irrelevant. Price assaulted Love because Price thought that Love was gay, so what? The point is the assault, not the reasoning behind it.
I have a philosophical problem with the concept that some crimes are more heinous than others because of the sexual orientation or race of the victims. That veers into the “special rights” that homophobes claim we want.
IMO, an assault on a gay victim should be prosecuted every bit as thoroughly as an assault on a hetero victim, but not more so. Ofd course, assaults on gay people tend to be treated as misdemeanors more often than not., but I want parity in the legal system for gay people, not a mirror image of the superiority hetero people presently enjoy.
I think that the correct analogy is if I were standing around on the street corner, and a black man walked up to me to ask a question and I beat the crap out of him because I thought that all blacks were muggers and was frightened. Yes, it’s motivated by prejudice and clearly reprehensible, but it’s not quite the same thing as going out looking for blacks/gays to beat up. The latter is usually what the legislature is thinking of when they write hate crime laws. Whether they would have intended to include the former is a question for the courts. In this case, that question was answered in the negative. The way the system is supposed to work, if the legislature cares about this type of case, they will now go back and amend the law to make it clearer for the next time the issue arises. I have my doubts about whether this will actually happen, but maybe there’s been enough publicity for the legislature to think about the issue (which probably didn’t occur to them when they passed the law).
Obviously the Georgia state legislature agreed and passed the hate crimes law. It’s equally obvious it’s ineffective, as many have stated.
And I will stand by my declaration of terrorism. Did his actions put the entire campus in fear? I’m sure it did. Did his actions put the GLBT community in fear? I’d say double, as the attack was clearly a gay-bashing (if not from a legal standpoint, from an emotional standpoint). Let the punishment fit the crime.
Esprix
orbifold
I never said the guy did not deserve prison. I think he does. The exact ammount of prison time, wether he deserves more or less is something I do not know.
Priceguy How long does it take for someone to go to their room and get a bat? I bet less than 2 minutes. Now I wish he had calmed down in that time and made a different choice but this is not a premeditated crime. No way, no how, no sir.
Oh? And how does that thought pop into your head?
You have no idea how far his room was from the bathroom.
The fact that he reacted to his bizarre belief he was being hit on by grabbing a baseball bat and beating them to death is heinous and psychotic.
Premeditation doesn’t require days of planning and a computer simulation.
To amplify: Not only was it a gay bashing, but the victim was straight and was killed for the perception that he was gay.
IMHO, he not only terrorized the gays on campus, but every guy on campus.
Mockingbird
THE VICTIM DID NOT DIE.
I’ve been in a few dorms in my life, though never at this particular school, and the showers are never that far away.
Come on! The guy leaves the victim alone, goes to get a weapon in order to beat the victim up, returns with the weapon and does just that. If he doesn’t calm down during that process, he’s got mental issues beyond hating gays (and the latter he does if the article can be trusted; he allegedly said “I hate these Morehouse faggots”, that’s about as clear as it comes).
If this were my college dorm it would take me 20 seconds to go from the shower to my room and return. Remember this guy is enraged. Enraged enough to want to bash in someones head. He is not walking. He is probably running. Do you calm down in 20 seconds? Do you calm down in 1 minute?
I’m not saying that this guy does not have mental problems. Someone pokes thier head in the shower does not mean go get a bat in any persons book. I do think he deserves prison time.
But
This is not premeditated.
Is this a hate crime? Well you have to look at the definition of the crime, (the Georgia Law in this case) and then look at the evidence provided. Now apparently the law is vague. This was the first case for that law so the DA have no expierence in what it takes to get a conviction for that law. But it is pretty cut and dried that if one person is hitting another person with a baseball bat, that the first person hates the second person.
My opinion, he probably wasn’t convicted of a hate crime because he turned himself in and never denied the attack.
Then again… if your a violent homophobe scared of being in a shower room with big guys… explain to me exactly why you are living in dorm at an all male university?
Brain… cannot compute…
Tell me what he is going to doing prison.