Memorial

[dwenius]

Mathew Shepard was killed 7 years ago today.

His murderers both copped pleas, and are serving consecutive life sentences in an undisclosed prison.

Later that year, the Wyoming legislature refused to enact a hate-crimes bill that was introduced in response to the killing. Federal efforts for a similar bill also failed within the year, thanks in no small part to the intervention of Trent Lott, who was all for a hate crimes bill when it was only protecting women and jews and even blacks, but throw in the queers and you get nowhere.

As a final, minor, ignorable-except-for-its-crass-fuck-knobbery point, Fred Phelps, Supreme Wingnut and Founder of the Westboro Baptist church, led a contingent of protesters to wave signs and shout slogans at Matthew's funeral.

Comments

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

Premeditated murder is premeditated murder. I don't see why doing so out of bigotry is somehow worse than doing it out of greed, jealousy, envy, or just plain fucked-in-the-headedness.

[eejitalmuppet.livejournal.com]

I don't know the finer details of the specific law which was proposed, but I get the impression that the intention of the hate crime laws, apart from extra publicity for those who introduce them[1], is to make it easier to demonstrate pre-meditation in cases where people kill random strangers because of race, gender, sexual orientation or whatever. When the accused tries to offer a plea of manslaughter ("Hey, I was drunk and got in a fight, but I didn't mean to kill the jerk", or somesuch), evidence of previous racist/misogynist/homophobic/whatever behaviour can be used to demonstrate premeditation where there is no other obvious motive. In theory, this makes it harder for such people to escape with 5 years for manslaughter. In practice, I'm not sure how well it works.