[Congressional Record Volume 145, Number 138 (Wednesday, October 13, 1999)]
[House]
[Pages H9962-H9963]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




               HATE CRIMES--OTHER NOT-SO-WELL-KNOWN CASES

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from New York (Mr. Weiner) is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. WEINER. Mr. Speaker, I do not know where Sylacauga, Alabama, is. 
But in February of 1999, Billy Jack Gaither, a gay man, was abducted 
and beaten to death with an ax handle and set afire among burning tires 
in a remote area.
  And frankly, Mr. Speaker, I do not know where Texas City, Texas, is 
either. But that is a place where two black gay men, Laaron Morris and 
Kevin Tryals, were shot to death and one of the men was left inside a 
burning car.
  And very frankly, Mr. Speaker, I do not know where Kenosha, 
Wisconsin, is, although I have heard of it. But that is a place where, 
in May of 1999, a 27-year-old man intentionally swerved his car onto a 
sidewalk to run over two African-American teens. After hitting the two 
cyclists, he left the scene and kept driving until stopped by police. 
Eight years earlier, the same man ran his car twice into a stopped van 
carrying five African-American men and drove away.
  I do not know where those places are. But very frankly, Mr. Speaker, 
I think

[[Page H9963]]

many Americans do not know where Laramie, Wyoming, was until about a 
year ago Matthew Shepard, an openly gay 21-year-old university student, 
was savagely beaten, burned, tied to a wooden fence in a remote area, 
and left to die in subfreezing temperatures.
  There is nothing about these cases that reflects poorly on those 
individual towns across America. In fact, hate crimes like these, 
unfortunately, are happening in towns big and small, major 
metropolises, small neighborhoods all across this country.
  Since 1991, when the Department of Justice started keeping hate crime 
statistics, they found after surveying hundreds of police department 
law enforcement agencies around this country that about 4,600 hate 
crimes had been committed. When they did a similar survey in 1997, they 
found that that number had nearly doubled to over 8,000.
  This is an epidemic, Mr. Speaker. Matthew Shepard made us all gasp in 
horror. But now we in Congress have an opportunity to act.
  Not so long ago, in 1990 and 1994, this House did act in passing the 
Hate Crime Statistics Act and Hate Crimes Sentencing Enhancement Act. 
But we have seen again and again that that law needs to be 
strengthened. We learned frankly from cases all across this country 
that there are problems with the current law that we are obligated to 
fix.
  The Federal prosecution of hate crimes can only happen if the crime 
is motivated by race, religion, national origin, color, and the 
assailant intended to prevent the victim from exercising a very 
narrowly defined protected right, like voting or attending school.
  The law is so narrowly written that we are seeing problems with 
prosecutions all around this country. In 1994, a Federal jury in Fort 
Worth, Texas, acquitted three white supremacists of Federal civil 
rights charges arising form unprovoked assaults on African-Americans, 
including one incident where the defendant knocked the man unconscious 
as he stood near a bus stop.

                              {time}  1815

  Some of the jurors revealed after the acquittal that although they 
were absolutely convinced that the crime was racially motivated, they 
could not find that it fit into one of these narrow racially protected 
activities. The same happened in 1992 when two white men chased a man 
of Asian descent from a nightclub in Detroit and beat him to death. The 
Department of Justice, with a great deal of help from the State and 
locality, tried to prosecute it using the current hate crimes law and 
failed because the law was too narrowly crafted.
  We have an opportunity with the bill that is currently before the 
House Committee on the Judiciary to deal with this problem, to broaden 
the crimes which the Federal Government, with the help of the States 
and localities, can prosecute. We have seen over and over again that if 
the Federal Government brings its forces to bear, that we can make a 
difference.
  Mr. Speaker, sometimes this House is criticized for acting only in 
the face of abject crisis. I believe that that crisis has been shown to 
us by the horror of Matthew Shepard. Now is the opportunity for us to 
act in this time of crisis, to pass the Hate Crimes Enhancement Act, to 
finally begin to do something to stop that increasing trend of hate 
crimes. I cannot promise anyone in this Chamber that if we were to pass 
this act, there will not be people with hate in their hearts, there 
will not be people who do horrific things in small towns and big cities 
all across this country. But I do know we have an obligation to act, 
because what happened to Matthew Shepard was not just a blow to that 
small town, it was not just a blow to gay rights, it was not just a 
blow to that person's family, it was a blow to our national family. It 
was a horror that all of us must address.

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