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The six Logan County, West Virginia residents who were charged with the week-long forcible confinement of a 20 year-old black woman who was beaten, sexually assaulted and forced to eat dog and rat feces will not be charged with a hate crime.
Last Sunday police visited a mobile home in a remote area after an anonymous tip was called in from someone who had witnessed the abuse. When the police left their car to speak to one of the suspects, Frankie Brewster who was sitting on the porch, they saw the woman though the window, limping towards the door. Besides being beaten and raped for at least a week, the woman had her hair ripped and cut out and been stabbed in her left leg at least four times. Medical reports believe the wounds were inflicted at least a week ago. Police are still looking for two more suspects, one who might have lured the girl over the Internet, kidnapping her and taking her to the house.
The discussion of this assault being constituted as a hate crime began when it was revealed that all of the women’s assailants, three men and three women, were white. More importantly, the victim told police that she was repeatedly called the ‘N-word’ right before each stabbing. Also, another one of the suspects, Karen Burton allegedly told the victim that she was being beaten because she was black.
Yesterday it was announced that hate charges would not be added to the present state charges that have been laid against the six suspects. If found guilty of the numerous kidnapping, forcible confinement assaults charges, the six will probably each serve life in prison, so if convicted of a hate crime (which is a Federal charge) it will not make much difference in the outcome. On a side note, state prosecutors also declined to press hate crime charges against two white teenagers from the same area of West Virginia when they were arrested for beating and repeatedly running over (with their car) a gay African-American man in 2000. The argument seems to be that unless the crime consists of denying someone a ‘federally protected’ right, such as voting, gaining employment or housing,’ racially motivated crimes do not automatically constitute as a hate crime.
While bloggers have been reporting on the case since it broke on Monday, there has been a bit of hesitancy by some as to how much they should comment on the story. Perhaps it is the recent development that the victim might have had a previous relationship with one of the suspects, therefore changing the ‘racial assault’ to a domestic assault….which while still considered heinous, it serves as a way to downplay the viciousness of the crime.
Rachel from Rachel’s Tavern looks at the way how some reports are emphasising the poverty-stricken, habitual criminally-minded suspects ( who have 108 criminal charges between them) by labelling them ‘white trash, thereby separating their actions on the basis that they are somehow not really ‘white.’ Jill from Feministe has this to say:
It takes a special kind of evil to do what those people did. But it’s not rare. It’s not a symptom of poverty. It’s not about “white trash.” For every one of us who reads these news articles in horror, there’s an upper middle class white college kid somewhere who idolizes Patrick Bateman and thinks that misogynist torture is kinda cool — you know, if you’re classy about it. The focus on the class background of these torturers obscures the larger picture of what they did. It makes it comprehensible — those pieces of trailer trash aren’t quite human, which is why they were capable of doing this. Only subhuman hillbillies are racist.
Is this another indication is that this is another example of (North) America’s history of sexual and racial violence towards black woman? What About our Daughters seems to think so. She has compiled an uncomfortably high amount of black women whose disappearances, rapes and murders that have garnered little (or any) media attention in comparison to reports of celebrities going without panties. Stephanie Dunn also weighs in at New Black Man taking a further look into how the media reports on these issues, commenting on the Don Imus case and how the attention quickly moved its focus from the black female basketball players and gravitiated towards the 'role' that Hip-Hop played in it - the dialogue about why what Imus said was
