Pennsylvania rednecks beat and kill Mexican illegal immigrant; get same sentence as beating a dog

The BBQ Pit
41

The law isn’t always going to be the number one issue on jurors minds. Vigilantism might not be legal, but I’d still venture to guess that vigilantes often get kinder sentences so long as they can make a case that they were just trying to correct something that Them Slimey Pinkos in the Gubmint are afraid to do.

Personally, I’m aware of the existence of kids who go around beating up dogs and homeless men and hookers, so I have no question that these two are of this ilk. But at the same time, there’s a reason why those particular categories are regular victims: If you beat up and kill a homeless man, it’s going to be harder for the police to track it back to you because no one cares for him and he has no relationship to you, and overall the majority of people just don’t care as much about such crimes as they do if you beat up a pretty blond girl.

Illegal immigrants fall into that category of easy victims. That’s not racism, that’s just reality.

42

I’d be amazingly impressed if they didn’t believe him to be an illegal for the reasons you’ll see in my last post.

43

I know what you mean. It’s really stupid that reckless manslaughter carries a lighter penalty than premeditated murder. The victim is just as dead. What does it matter what the killer was thinking?

44

According to this editorial, the original fight was over a 15-year-old girl who the victim may have been involved with, and the killers used a racial slur, but didn’t say anything about illegals.

45

Or it could be, perhaps, that the jurors believed the Defense Attorney’s version that there was no intent of death and was the result of a fight escalated by both sides. Maybe they focused on the report that the victim charged them after the initial beating. In my jurisdiction, similar cases, without the racial overtones, had similar results.

What I see is a somewhat one-sided report, with no interviews of the jurors, and a lot of speculation on what was in the mind of the jurors based on their race and the races of the parties. I don’t necessarily think we can jump to the conclusion that racial bias was the reason for the verdict. Additionally, I have never heard of a trial, other than death penalty cases, where jurors can consider, or are even informed of the sentencing consequences.

46

I’m sure even your average Pennsylvanian knows the difference between a felony and a misdemeanour.

47

Ah, well then perhaps best to take back what I said about their motives. Perhaps it was racist. Whether the jury sided with them due to racism or not, I’d still hesitate to put it down strongly on racial motivation. More likely they were told that it was a fight over a girl and if any racial epithets went out, that’s just because hey that’s what people do when they’re angry and exchanging blows.

Premeditated murder is a different thing from beating up the guy who’s hitting on your girl and he happens to fall dead from a hit that hit just right.

48

You said "you could have written the title as “Two college students capture and kill fugitive from justice”. That looks very much like an attempt to justify what they did. And to put illegal immigration on the same ethical level as, say, mass murder.

And the illegal immigrant issue is almost wholly about race. It’s not about the law, or there would be just as much hostility towards the people who illegally employ them. It’s not about immigration, because it’s focused so much on Mexican and other dark skinned illegal immigrants. Not Canadians or Germans or anyone white who illegally immigrants, but Mexicans and brown people in general. It’s about race.

49

I am so sick of right wing believers being full of shit.

Seriously. I honestly** do not want** to believe that it’s impossible to be right wing and be honest, because that seems ridiculous and impossible. So I reject that conclusion and continue to assume that there are enormous numbers of people whose political philosophy is solidly on the right side of the fence who manage to hold those views while also rejecting and avoiding any of the blatant bullshit that comes from so much of the right. I am determined to believe that there are rightys who do not find it necessary to obscure truth or invent anything in order to hew to their beliefs. Who can be genuinely “reality based” and still have cherished convictions which can only be labeled “conservative”.

But I don’t know how much longer I can hold out. And truly, it sucks. Because it’s scary to think that an enormous sector of the American population and the people who represent it really can’t be trusted to think clearly, and if everyone with a “right” mind keeps lying, buying lies, and grossly distorting reality in order to believe what they do, then that’s the only possible conclusion one can come to.

And I pick this thread to say this just because reading Lonesome and Sage’s comments just happened to top off my tank of “Holy crap, can anyone on the right stick to the truth? Are their ideas and beliefs really so weak that the only way they can support them is by living in a state of perpetual denial, disingenuousness and dishonesty? Seriously?”.

50

Yes. America in general is so far to the right that being ***even farther ***to the right puts you firmly in the “lunatics and scum” category.

51

Or it could be an attempt to show that different people can see the same story in entirely different lights so jumping to any particular conclusion on their motivations is probably wrong.

As it turned out, the result was probably neither racially motivated nor vigilantism motivated. So while my alternate hypothesis wasn’t correct, my overall point to not be hasty was in fact the right point to make.

52

Real life is messy: I suspect that the motivation was mixed, and included elements of racism and vigilantism. Would the incident have led to to death if the victim had not been Mexican and apparently an illegal immigrant? Of coure, it’s impossible to know for sure, but it does seem to have been an aggrating circumstance.

53

I don’t know if I agree with this as the root cause, frankly. The numbers that flow illegally across the Mexican border have to double or triple those that flow illegally across from Canada, so naturally any backlash will appear to be ''about race". I suspect that if, say, you exactly replaced (with all the good and bad that comes with them) Mexican immigrants with white Polish ones that the problem would not be THAT much different, in that there would be backlash against anyone who seemed to be ‘invading’ your country. This is especially true for those who would choose to engage in a street fight like the malcontents in the OP. What motivates people is different, to be sure, but saying it’s purely racism, akin to the American south in the 20’s is not entirely valid.

The idea of a hate crime though, is another issue. Truth in sentencing regulations regarding violent crimes would be enough to sate the need for ‘extra punishment’ for the motivation of the crime.

54

One could point out that there have always been waves of serious anti-immigrant (legal or otherwise) violence and discrimination in this country, and that until this most recent one against Mexicans it wasn’t even possible for it to be racist (possibly religious-ist or jingoist), because the discriminated-against parties were Irish*, Polish, etc.

Obviously, either way, the verdict is nonsensical when compared to the actual magnitude of the harm done.

  • Why yes, I do spend a lot of time hanging out with someone who thinks “paddy wagon” should be as offensive as it would be as if it were “spic wagon” or “nigger wagon”.
55

It is possible for it to be racist if those disciminating think that the Irish, Poles, etc., belong to an inferior race. Racism does not have to be based on a reality of different races, just on a perception of racial differences. Irish as a race is a bit odd, it’s true, but have you never heard of the “Slavic race”? Hitler certainly believed in it.

56

I honestly have no idea what those jurors were thinking, and I never said I did.

On a side note, do you have any idea what is involved in beating someone to death? If this were a just a fight escalated by both sides, shouldn’t there be similar injuries on both sides.

Even if this started out as a fight, it ceased to be one when it became so one-sided that one side (the side that’s significantly out-numbered) is on the ground literally having their skull kicked open. That’s when it became murder.

57

Yes, but that’s pretty rare. Strictly speaking, most anti-Irish or anti-Polish sentiment in America was xenophobia rather than racism.

58

Jesus H. Christ.

This thread is a motherlode of bullshit; it’s like a fucking TAT where the lefties see a social justice problem and the righties see an immigration problem, and then put words in each other’s mouths that prove their own worldview is accurate.

The best part to me is watching the narrative change depending on who is trying to show how big their dick is. You dumb gits read approximately one article about this crime. From that one, single sentence, about the guy being a Mexican you can tell that an outrage was committed and that these people are all spitting tobacco juice through their missing teeth while they crochet rebel flags and KKK hoods as their illegal slave housemaid scrubs down their huntin’ truck in the driveway.

But, god forbid, while you promote this version of social injustice, anyone else’s attempts to spin the tale to their own ends is the old “typical right bullshit” or whatever else you wanna call it. (By the way, ShibbOleth whether or not the law protects all citizens equally isn’t really on point here, since an illegal is pretty much by definition not a citizen.)

I particularly like the description of the Jena 6 boys. They were just doing what was done to them, standing up against the racist whiteys. Just like that poor mexican guy was accosted for not having papers and then got beaten to death.

Hate to break it to you, but the whole Jena 6 thing started with an argument over which clique could sit under a tree. There was no racial violence perpetrated by either side. Then, about a week later, 6 black kids jumped a white kid from behind. The white kid, by all accounts, was not at all involved in the argument over the tree. The Jena 6 proceded to beat the crap out of him (it wasn’t just “bruises”).

Now I don’t give a shit what sentence the kids got in either case, but accusing the right wingers of spinning the story is pure hypocritical bullshit. The OP and most every other poster in this thread (cept DrDeth) are just looking for something they can be comfortably outraged about, because everything that happens is another instance of people suckling the teat of the hardworking American or another example of how those people that don’t live in the right part of the country are bascially characters straight out of Deliverance.

By all means, though, keep accusing each other of intellectual dishonesty; it’s like watching a couple of retards duelling to the death with plastic spoons.

59

I’m sure someone else has already complained, but comparing Buchanan to the Polecat is an enormous insult to Buchanan, just ash LP’s name is an insult to skunks.

60

I dunno, the KKK was certainly xenophobic as well as racist but having anti-Catholicism as one of their primary tenets for a long time is a good first evidence for it being a racist attitude :slight_smile: