Hate Crimes: October 2004 Archives

The state Supreme Court tossed out Georgia's hate crimes law Monday, meaning state lawmakers will have to revisit a roiling debate that divided them deeply four years ago.

The law barely passed the Legislature in 2000 after bitter arguments about whether some crimes are worse than others when bigotry is in the heart of the accused. It passed only after protections for gay people were removed and the law rewritten to vaguely refer to "bias or prejudice." Of the 48 states with hate-crimes laws, Georgia's was the only one not to specify who would be protected. (source)

This is a change. A student who was harassed constantly from 1993 to 1998 because he was perceived to be gay, has lost his case against the school, because he is straight.

His sexual orientation has absolutely nothing to do with this. The reason for the harassment is irrelevant. The fact that the school did not stop it is totally relevant, and having the principal claim that they didn't have the resources to stop it completely is a cop out. You do what it takes to stop it. Because of this, Mr. Jubran's education and future have been compromised. I think that deserves a bit of consideration, and a hell of a lot more than $4,000 (which was overturned in the ruling).

(Vancouver, British Columbia) A former North Vancouver student who claims he was bullied for five years is appealing a court ruling that said because he is straight he wasn't protected under the law.

Azmi Jubran, had told the Human Rights Commission tribunal that even though he is not gay he was routinely called "faggot," "homo" and "gay" while attending Handsworth Secondary from 1993 to 1998. He had a variety of objects thrown at him and was kicked and spat upon. Students threatened to drop him in acid and to rape him with a broom. During a school camping trip his tent was urinated on.

Principal Terry Shaw testified he had never seen a student harassed as badly as Jubran was, but with almost 13,000 students and only 70 teachers, he didn't have the resources to stop it completely.

The tribunal condemned the attacks and awarded Jubran $4,000 in damages. But, the school board appealed and a judge overturned the commission decision saying that the bullying wasn't homophobic because Jubran is straight. (source)

Eastern High beating may have been gay bashing

By TODD HEYWOOD

The brutal attack at Eastern High School last month may have been an act of gay bashing, possibly resulting from homosexual panic.

Lansing police Detective James Gill and Ingham County prosecutor Stuart Dunnings III have both confirmed that homosexuality appears to have been a factor in the severe beating of the 16-year-old student on Sept. 17. The victim remains hospitalized.

Police arrested Jeremy Lee, 17, who was charged with assault. He is now in Ingham County Jail.

Authorities said the victim is believed to be gay. When asked if the victim’s sexual orientation was the motivation in the Sept. 17 attack, Gill said, “Yes. That is correct.”

Authorities said the attack apparently stems from a verbal confrontation Lee and the victim had last year, when they were both students at Walter French Academy, the defunct charter school. “I think the defendant made an innuendo that the victim might be gay,” Dunnings said of last year’s incident, “and the victim came back with, 'That's OK, I suck your dick.'”

Lee claimed he went to Eastern on the day of the beating to pick up academic records and only saw the other student by accident. Gill said Lee told him he had gone to Eastern “to drop out.”

“He said he heard music coming from a room,” Gill continued. “He went to the room, and the victim came out and brushed up against him. The accused started thinking about what had happened at Walter French and started hitting him.”

But a school official disputes Lee’s contention that he was at Eastern to pick up records. “He was not a student at the school,” Mark Mayes, a spokesman for the Lansing School District, said. “There were no records pertaining to him at the school. He had no legitimate reason to be at the school.”

Jeffrey Montgomery, executive director of the Triangle Foundation in Detroit, said “gay panic” could be involved. Lawyers argued in the Matthew Shepard and Jenny Jones cases, among others, that that the defendants became violent after their sexual orientation was questioned.

“From what’s known about this incident, it seems clear to me it is a very good case of gay panic,” Montgomery said. “We all know gay panic is a potent motive to do damage, sometimes irreparable damage, to victims.”

The Triangle Foundation monitors and tracks hate crimes and other acts of discrimination against the gay community in Michigan.

Lee's attorney, Greg Bell, says he does not believe that homosexuality was a factor in the attack. He said Lee has told him what the motivations were, but Bell declined to discuss them.

Lee has been charged with assault with intent to do great bodily harm less than murder. He is being held on $100,000 bail pending an Oct. 13 court appearance.

The victim, who was in a medically induced coma until recently, is awake but unable to talk, Gill said. The victim does recognize his mother and grandmother, added Gill, but remains in critical condition.

The attack was caught on the school’s security cameras. The assault has led district officials to implement a plan that requires students to keep their student IDs visible.

I've had many discussions with people about the need for laws specifically to add time to the punishment resulting from a crime that was committed because of bias against some individual because of race, religion, or sexual orientation. Many well read people will come to the conclusion that all crimes are hate crimes.

That has always bothered me, because it seems like a cop out and it belittles the nature of the crime. Let's take a glaring example. Matthew Shepard was given such a severe beating, that he lapsed into a coma and died in a hospital five days later. You can say that the crime was horrible and that there are already laws on the books to punish that. That's true. The boys who did that to Matthew are each facing two life sentences, to be served consecutively. They will never set foot outside the prison that holds them, until they die of old age. I think justice was served. Sure, except for the death penalty, you could punish them more by just adding more time.

But what about crimes such as the one described below? The purpose of hate crime legislation is to try to prevent the crime from happening in the first place. The impetus for the crime itself was biased that was carried to a violent conclusion. Hate crime legislation would punish not the biased itself, but would punish that violent acting out of that biased, even if significant injuries didn't result from the assault.

The police are calling the crime below a hate crime. Yet, Texas has no hate crime law. No additional time will be taken into consideration for the biased.

Many will disagree with me on this. I realize that. But, I've seen first hand what hate can do. People are free to hate anyone they wish, but if they act on that hate thinking they will get away with it, we end up with crimes like the one described below.

What do you think?

Further reading
Should Crimes Against Gays Be Considered Hate Crimes?

A 17 year old high school student is badly beaten, in what police are calling a hate crime. The Cleburne, Texas, high school senior is suffering several broken bones in his face. Police say he was at a party, when he was beaten because his attackers believed he was a homosexual. Three teenagers are now in police custody. All 3 boys are charged with 2nd degree felony aggravated assault. (source)

“In Texas, there is a history of devaluing the lives of gay men and lesbians, which means people who murder them tend to receive lighter sentence because of who their victims are. But today justice was done. This is the first time a gay basher has been convicted of capital murder in Texas.”

Those were the words of Dianne Hardy-Garcia of the Lesbian and Gay Rights Lobby back in 1994 after Donald Aldrich was sentenced to death in Texas for the murder of Nicholas West, a young gay man in Tyler, Texas.

Today, Donald Aldrich is scheduled to be executed in Texas for the murder of Nicholas West. Another accomplice, Henry Earl Dunn was previously executed in February 2003 for the same crime. And, a third man, David McMillan, who was 17 at the time of the attack, received a life prison term.

In testimony, Dunn said he was at the Bergfield Park in Tyler, Texas on November 30, 1993. The park was known as a homosexual meeting spot where West, a medical clerk, was lured under the guise of seeking sex but was abducted and taken to a remote area of Smith County. There West was stripped, ordered to his knees and shot as many as 15 times.

Mr. Aldrich justified his actions by saying, “If you can walk into a 7-11 and rob a 7-11 for 15, 20 bucks, get your face on videotape, have somebody that's gonna call the police; or if you can go into a park, rob somebody that's out in the dark, come away with a hell of a lot more - because of the fact that they're homosexual and they don't want people to know it, they're not gonna go report it to the police. Who you gonna go rob? Where you're gonna get in the least amount of trouble.”

And that is the crux of the problem, isn't it? They felt they could pull this off because of society's attitude towards homosexuals. This was the third robbery and beating they had done that week, all of homosexual men. None of victims reported the crime. I can't help but think that society holds some blame for this. If there had been a place for Nicholas and others like him to meet without being harassed, would this have happened? We are social animals. We will do what we can to be with people we connect with. Nicholas was no different from any of the rest of us.

I used to be against the death penalty. I'm still not sure where I stand on it, to be totally honest. I am against the taking of life - all life, but I've concluded that I'm not even qualified to offer an opinion. The real qualification comes from being on the side of Nicholas West, where the bullets were being fired, where the assault was being inflicted. He is the one who received unimaginable pain and suffering, to say nothing of the absolute horror he must have endured. If we are to offer a fair judgment on if we are for or against the death penalty, we should have to feel what Nicholas felt as well. And that's just not possible. He's gone, and by the end of this day, another one of his killers will be gone as well.

One thing that surprised me was that Donald Aldrich has a website. On this site, he posted an article that appeared in the Houston Chronicle on July 22, 2004. It read:

July 22, 2004

Suit challenges injection makeup

By HARVEY RICE, Houston Chronicle

A death row inmate has filed a lawsuit accusing Texas of using chemicals in its lethal injections that violate the constitutional ban on causing unusual pain and suffering.

The lawsuit by Donald Loren Aldrich, 39, sentenced to death for the 1992 hate slaying of a gay man, is one of a growing number of lawsuits alleging the use of lethal injection by Texas and other states violates the Eighth Amendment prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment.

It's amazing to me that Mr. Aldrich can say that lethal injection is cruel, given that he, Mr. Dunn, and Mr. McMillan lead Nicholas West to his death where they stripped him of his clothes, taunted him, and slowly and methodically shot him to death with 15 bullets. Surely, lethal injection will be far more merciful than the death Nicholas faced at their hands.

Further coverage:
Inmate to die Tuesday in slaying of gay Tyler man
Killing the Killers of Nicholas West
From the Attorney General of Texas on Henry Dunn
10/12/2004 - Donald Aldrich executed
10/13/2004 - Aldrich Execution Gives Closure

Following is the what happened that night. I will warn you that it is very graphic. But, I think it should be remembered, because of what Nicholas had to endure that night.