I know. I've heard the arguments. "We don't need hate crime laws - there are enough laws on the books to cover the acts already."
Or, "Hate crime laws will make people's thoughts and opinions illegal - do we want thought police?"
I offer these few examples to refute those claims....the scary part is that these examples only represent anti-gay violence... I'm sure there are plenty more than this list involving blacks, hispanics, Jews, and immigrants...
1984
Dan White, who murdered San
Francisco mayor George Moscone and openly gay city
supervisor Harvey Milk was paroled after serving five
years. His original sentence for the double murder
was seven years, eight months.
1974
An Arkansas man who had been sentenced to
death for killing a gay man received a reduction in
sentence, to nine years with the possibility of
parole after 2 ½ years.
1987
Andre Nichols, 19, was acquitted of murdering
a Catholic priest after claiming the priest made
sexual advances toward him.
1969
Three Los Angeles Police Department vice
officers beat to death J. McCann, a gay man. A panel
of coroners found his death an "excusable homicide."
1989
In Florida, David Schwartz was sentenced to
ten years, with the possibility of parole after five,
for beating a gay man to death outside a Florida gay
nightclub.
1983
Suspended sentences were given to five young
men who beat a gay man to death and confessed to
brutalizing over twenty gay men.
1996
Jamie Nabozny charged that his high school
failed to take action when he was physically and
verbally attacked because of his sexual orientation.
Incidents included an attack in which students held
him down and urinated on him, and an assault in which
he was so viciously kicked in the stomach that he
required surgery.
1969
In Berkeley, a police officer fatally shot a
gay man, Frank Bartley, to death. The death was ruled
accidental. Gay organizations in the California
attempted to call attention to the unusually high
number of gay men "accidentally" shot or beaten to
death by police.
1987
In Boston, two firefighters were found guilty
of assaulting Kris Pierce and Laurel Bowman, both
lesbians, and John Welch, a gay man. They were
sentenced to six months probation .
1988
In Texas, Richard Lee Bednarski and nine
friends went out looking for gay men to harass.
Bednarski killed 34 year old Tommy Trimble and 27
year old Lloyd Griffin. He would be found guilty, and
the judge would be criticized for giving him a light
sentence. Explaining the reason for the sentence, the
judge stated that killing gay men was not a serious
crime.
1990
Twelve US marines attacked three gay men
outside a gay bar, leaving two of them unconscious.
Two of the marines were fined $400 and confined to
their barracks for 30 days. Despite witness accounts
that several of the marines chanted "kill the fags,"
Marine officials ruled that it was not a gay bashing
but a bar brawl.
1979
A group of 40 people in Cincinnati Ohio who
had reserved a city park pool for a gay pride party
were outnumbered and attacked by local residents who
threw rocks and bottles at them. Police arrived,
watched for a while, then drove away. One man had to
be rescued by a television news crew. Police refused
to return.
1984
Charles Howard, a young gay man, was killed
when three teenagers in Bangor Maine threw him off a
bridge. They would be found guilty of manslaughter.
Two were released within two years.
1990
Two men in Adrian Michigan were sentenced to
five years for having sex in a park. The judge who
sentenced them previously gave a lenient sentence to
a gay-basher and then sympathized with the defendant
about how awful it must have been for him to have a
gay man make a pass at him.
1985
A gay man was beaten to death by a man who
feared he could contract AIDS because he drank from
the same bottle as the man. He would be sentenced to
three months in prison for the murder.
1989
A Philadelphia gay man reported that after a
police officer interrupted an anti-gay attack the
officer allowed the attacker to leave, and refused to
take the victim to the hospital.
1994
Over 100 people gathered to protest a
sentence by district court judge David Young on David
Thacker, who plead guilty to killing a gay man
because of his sexual orientation. He was sentenced
to six years rather than the maximum sentence of
fifteen years.
1983
In Washington DC a gay man was abducted,
slashed with a knife, kicked, and urinated on. His
two attackers would later be found guilty and
sentenced to probation.
1989
A judge in Texas was censured for giving a
light sentence to a teenager who murdered two men
because they were gay. He explained the sentence by
saying that he couldn't give a life sentence to a
teenage boy just because he killed a couple of
homosexuals.
Special thanks to generationx187 for this contribution:
On the night of October 7, 1979, four young men abducted two gays off a street in Manhattan's Greenwich Village, forced them into their car and drove to a deserted beach on Staten Island, where they then proceed to punch, kick and beat the gays with driftwood for several hours, leaving them for dead when finished. One of the victims, Steven Charles of Newark, New Jersey, did indeed die; the other victim survived. The four assailants were apprehended approximately two months later and three of them eventually pleaded guilty to manslaughter (the fourth apparently got off completely). The alleged "leader" of the assault, Costabile "Gus" Farace, was paroled after serving seven years. (Farace of course became a nationwide household name when he murdered a federal drug agent on Staten Island in 1989, only to be brutally killed himself eight months after that).
Please help add to this list of concrete examples of hate crimes by sending me your EMAILS. Thank you.
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