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Shenandoah Hate Crime A Fair Housing Act Violation

Hate crime may be in decline judging by the number of incidents and victims reported per the FBI's statistics published in November of 2010.

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Hate crime may be in decline judging by the number of incidents and victims reported per the FBI's statistics published in November of 2010.

Nevertheless little comfort it poses for each of the victims attacked for at least one of the five main biases: 4,057 due to their race -mostly African-American-, 1,575 because of their religion -mostly Jewish-, 1,482 due to their sexual orientation, 1,109 due their ethnicity –mostly Hispanic-, and 99 solely for being disabled.

 

In October 2010 "three men were indicted in New Mexico for assaulting a disabled Navajo man; one individual was sentenced for putting a hangman's noose on the house of a Honduran immigrant in Louisiana; and another man was sentenced for burning a predominantly African-American church in Massachusetts;" reported the FBI.

One other fatal victim of the July 12, 2008 hate crime in Shenandoah, PA was Mexican immigrant Luis Ramirez.

This week, the perpetrators have been sentenced to 9 years in prison, after a federal jury "found both defendants (Piekarsky and Donchak) guilty of a felony violation of the federal Fair Housing Act for fatally beating Luis Ramirez because he was Latino and because they did not want Latinos living in Shenandoah (PA)," commented the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice.

Even though the sentences imposed by Federal Judge Richard Caputo were less than the 12 to 15 years called for by the federal sentencing guidelines, for Judge Caputo there was not doubt of the aim and underlying cause of this tragedy: "The intent was to do harm…Mr. Ramirez died because of his race."

This measure of justice, is no doubt better than the parody of justice the local Shenandoah jury put up in 2009 finding the teenager murderous gang not guilty which was then widely celebrated with "several cars driving through Shenandoah blowing their horns," as chronicled then by the Republican Herald.

Thanks to the Federal Justice, today the mood in Shenandoah is somber, while one of the felons, Piekarsky, at last expressed remorse and apologized to the Ramirez family.

Justice though, found its way in the most Kafkaesque, yes nightmarishly bizarre way, the conviction came due to the violation of the Fair Housing Act -preventing a Hispanic man from living in Shenandoah- and not for the sole crime of murder.  

It reminisces of the kind of justice brought against one of the most conspicuous mafia criminals in American history, Al Capone, who only served prison terms for tax evasion and contempt of court, and not for his numerous extortions, assaults, and murders.

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