Hate Crime in America: The Debate Continues   [open pdf - 320KB]

"In December 2000, in Brooklyn, New York, Mohammad Awad punched Cham Spear while yelling obscenties and anti-Semitic remarks. In nearby Queens, Nicholas Minucci, a Caucasian, fractured the skull of African American Glenn Moore with a baseball bat and robbed him in June 2005. Witnesses testified that Minucci used a racial slur before and during the attack. In October 1998, near Laramie, Wyoming, Russell Henderson and Aaron McKinney robbed, beat, and tied Matthew Shepard, a gay man, to a fence. Five days after the attack, Shepard died from his injures. In Houston, Texas, David Tuck attacked and sexually assaulted a Hispanic teenager in April 2006. Tuck shouted 'white power' and racial slurs during the attack. Awad and Minucci were each convicted of a hate crime. Wyoming, where Shepard was murdered, does not have a hate-crime statute. Houston authorities did not charge Tuck with a hate crime because the charges against him already carried a life sentence. In many cases, hate may be seen or perceived by the victims, their families, witnesses, and even law enforcement to be the motivation for a crime, but perpetrators may not be charged with a hate crime for a variety of reasons-many of the same reasons that the debate on hate-crime laws continues in this country."