Many people (primarily Republican politicians) objected to the passage of the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act last November, for a variety of reasons. The principle opposition to the bill didn’t want sexual orientation added as a protected class.
However the law that Congress passed and President Obama signed did much more than extend federal protection to the victims of crimes committed because of their sexual orientation. It also expanded the scope of the prior 1969 federal hate crimes law, which previously was restricted only to hate crimes committed against victims “engaging in a federally-protected activity, like voting or going to school.” The Matthew Shepard Act as it has been come to be known also gives the Department of Justice and the FBI “greater ability to engage in hate crimes investigations that local authorities choose not to pursue.”
That last point is critical, and we are starting to see the results of increasing federal protections for the victims of these acts of terror.
For one example, consider the case of Ronald Pudder. Pudder, a white male in Conneaut, Ohio, a small community outside Cleveland with a population that is 96% white, committed arson against a small African American church. When confronted by videotape evidence of his actions Pudder confessed his guilt. Evidence that his crime was racially motivated was not hard to find:
Ronald Pudder, 23, admitted to setting fire to the First Azusa Apostolic Faith Church of God in Conneaut in May. He poured gasoline on three doors of the only black church in a mostly-white area, before setting them on fire. Firefighters put out the early-morning fire before the interior of the church was harmed. […]
… Pudder messaged a friend that he was going to burn down a church and that he was going to kill a black person. He sent a message to another friend saying he was going to start a fire, and later told the friend he had burned a church.
As a simple arson in which no individual was harmed, Pudder faced no more than six months in jail under state law. Federal authorities, however, concerned about a rash of copycat crimes stepped in and immediately charged Pudder with two refused to prosecute the arson as a hate crime, the federal authorities stepped in and, under the provisions of the Matthew Shepard Act, charged Pudder with two felony counts back in September.
The two-count indictment against 23-year-old Ronald Pudder of Conneaut, who is white, was detailed at a news conference Friday with the nation’s top civil rights attorney, Thomas E. Perez, assistant attorney general for the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division.
He said the government was determined to deter a rash of copycat crimes.
“Hate crimes reflect a cancer of the soul,” Perez said. “They are designed not only to injure the particular victim or victims, but to send a message to the community: a message of fear, an effort to divide communities along racial or religious lines.”
On Monday, Pudder pled guilty as part of a plea bargain in which Federal authorities will seek a sentence of 41-51 months. The Office of the US District Attorney for Northern Ohio, issued the following statement about Pudder’s guilty plea:
“Crimes like these leave scars,” Dettelbach said. “Not just physical scars to the building, but emotional ones, to the souls of the congregants. Doing this attack based on the parishoners’ race is an act that does violence to who we are as Americans and Ohioans.”
Hate crimes do indeed leave scars, whether the crime is the directed against Christians, Jews or Muslims, members of the LGBT community or members of racial or ethnic minorities like this disabled Navaho man who had a swastika burned into his arm with a coat hanger among other things done to him in Farmington New Mexico.
William Hatch, 29, Paul Beebe, 26 and Jesse Sanford, 25, are said to have branded a swastika on the 22-year-old Navajo man’s arm in April using a coat hanger heated on a stove.
Prosecutors say the men then shaved another swastika on the back of the victim’s head and used marker pens to scrawl on his body, including ‘KKK’, ‘White Power’, a pentagram and a sexually graphic image. […]
Federal prosecutors say they were able to bring the case because the 2009 law eliminated a requirement that a victim must be engaged in a federally protected activity, such as voting or attending school, for hate crime charges to be levelled. […]
The swastika branding has also put the spotlight back on Farmington, a predominantly white community of about 45,000 residents near the Navajo Nation.
In the past many local authorities simply refused to prosecute such violent acts as hate crimes even if their state had an adequate hate crimes law on the books. Now we don’t have to rely upon local authorities to bring these charges when they are appropriate.
And that, my friends, is progress, small though it may seem to some.
