Another Hoax of Hate Crime Legislation

So I am to understand that according to some jerks in Congress (I am looking at you, Ms. Foxx, and your pants are on fire) think that the passage of Hate Crime Legislation is unnecessary, believing that it would unnecessarily cause the harsher prosecution of crimes that are already finding justice in the Court System™.

Then I read this horrible story, via elle, phd, about Luis Ramirez.  Murdered for the crime of being Mexican while walking home at night.  Brutally beaten while having racial epithets thrown at him, and death threats slung at the woman walking w/ him.

The golden angels that were the accused couldn’t possibly have committed a hate crime that was racially based, b/c they were, ya know, Good Boys™, and star athletes, and we know full well that great athletes never do anything horrible like this.  I mean, until they were 17 and 19 they had never done anything like this, as if somehow not killing someone until then deserved a fucking cookie.

The teenage boys beat Ramirez, and then kicked him repeatedly in the head, causing him to convulse and his brain to ooze from his skull.  The lawyers for the teens never denied that they attacked Ramirez.  They did, however claim that race was not a motivating factor.  But:

A retired Philadelphia police officer testified at a preliminary hearing that she heard one of the defendants yell “Tell your [expletive] Mexican friends to get the [expletive] out of Shenandoah or you’ll be [expletive] laying next to him.” The defendant’s comments were directed at Ramirez’s friends who came to his aid after receiving a distress call from him on a cell phone during the beating.

And yet, they were acquitted of all charges.  Simple as that, by an entirely white jury.  Funny, that.

And now people are all up in arms b/c some are calling for a federal prosecution of this crime, claiming that it is double jeopardy, even though double jeopardy doesn’t apply when a crime can be prosecuted both locally and federally.  This senseless crime deserves to be tried by a Federal Court in hopes that these boys be held accountable for their hateful crimes.  They are criminals, and deserve to be treated as such, and be tried for snuffing out a young man’s life.

I am not saying that Hate Crime Legislation would have brought justice for Ramirez, b/c as we found w/ the Angie Zapata trial, no justice can truly be done when lives are hatefully cut short, but I think that it would be a step in the right direction.  When a crime is so clearly committed out of hate of an Other we need tighter laws to ensure that the courts don’t let this slip away.  We need to send a strong message that a crime committed out of hate is not going to be tolerated.  Bills like The Matthew Shepard Act seek to protect people on the fringe, people deemed less worthy by Society at large.  We can see that hate crimes don’t just happen during federally protected acts, and that a man beaten down mercilessly in an alley for being Mexican deserves just as much justice as if he were voting.  That a woman doesn’t deserve to have her head smashed in w/ a fire extinguisher for her gender presentation.  That lives and bodies matter, no matter how many bigots (or members of Congress) believe otherwise.