By FRANK ELTMAN
The Associate Press
RIVERHEAD, N.Y. — A former high school athlete who plunged a knife into the chest of an Ecuadorean immigrant during a street fight that cast a national spotlight on bias crimes against Hispanics was convicted of manslaughter as a hate crime Monday but acquitted of murder.
Jeffrey Conroy, 19, was one of seven teenagers implicated in the November 2008 stabbing death of Marcelo Lucero in what prosecutors say was the culmination of an ongoing campaign of violence targeting Hispanics. The teens alluded to "beaner-hopping" or "Mexican hopping."
Conroy shook his head slightly when the verdict was announced in the packed courtroom. His brother and sister left the courthouse in tears.
"The hunting season is over, at least for now," brother Joselo Lucero said later.
Four other defendants have pleaded guilty to hate crime-related charges. Two others are awaiting trial.
Conroy was the only one of the seven charged with murder and manslaughter; prosecutors said he was the one who inflicted the fatal wound in a midnight fight near the Patchogue train station. He faces eight to 25 years in prison when he is sentenced on May 26.
District Attorney Thomas Spota called the verdict fair, but defense attorney William Keahon said he would appeal.
"Unfortunately, in our system of justice, sometimes young men and women are convicted of crimes they did not commit," Keahon said.
Pablo Colle, of Ecuador's National Department of Migration, said Ecuadorean officials weren't satisfied with the verdict. "We did expect to have a charge for murder," he said.
The killing sent shock waves far beyond Long Island's Suffolk County, where animosity over the influx of thousands of immigrants from Central and South America has been on the rise for nearly a decade.
Latino Justice-PRLDEF repeatedly lobbied for a federal investigation of hate crimes on Long Island following the killing. The U.S. Department of Justice announced last fall it would investigate hate crimes and the police response to them.
Conroy, a three-sport athlete at Patchogue-Medford High School, told police he was responsible for the stabbing but took the witness stand to say he had taken the blame for one of his co-defendants — a teenager he had just met earlier that night.
Lucero, 37, was walking with a friend when they were confronted by the teenagers. Prosecutors say the teens were walking around town looking for targets, began yelling ethnic slurs and approached the two men. One of the teens punched Lucero in the face. Lucero and his friend swung their belts in self-defense and began to chase the teens.
Prosecutors said Lucero hit Conroy in the head with the belt and that the teen lost his temper, opened the folding knife and lunged at Lucero's chest.
Conroy, who has been held without bail since his arrest the night of the killing, testified that co-defendant Christopher Overton told him he had stabbed Lucero. He said Overton had told him earlier in the night that he had a burglary conviction in a case where the homeowner was killed and could not afford further trouble with the police.
Overton has pleaded not guilty in the Lucero case. His attorney has derided Conroy's claims as scapegoating by someone facing a long prison term.
Conroy has a swastika tattoo and a lightning bolt tattoo intended to symbolize "white power," according to trial testimony. On the stand, Conroy said he allowed a friend to place the swastika tattoo on his upper thigh on a dare.
Many Hispanics attacked in the days before Lucero's killing were afraid to report the crimes to police, fearing questions about their immigration status, prosecutors said. A September 2009 report by the Southern Poverty Law Center, a national civil rights organization, included the Lucero killing in its decade-long timeline documenting anti-immigrant attacks throughout the country.
Ecuador's ambassador in Washington, Luis Gallegos, said in a statement before the verdict was announced that he hoped an appropriate punishment would be meted out to set an example to others.
"What concerns us in the United States are crimes of hatred and xenophobia, obviously linked to racism," he said in a telephone interview with The Associated Press before the verdict. "We believe that in the trial of Mr. Lucero, there must be a sentence of the greatest severity so that this kind of crime is not repeated."
The trial was being followed by many in Ecuador.
"We Hispanics are so unsafe when we go elsewhere, and let's hope that everyone involved in that group that mistreats Hispanics is punished," said Nimia Villacreces, a 33-year-old auditor.
Mauricio Trujillo, a 42-year-old lawyer, added: "It's not enough to punish just one youth, because various people were implicated."
After the Lucero killing, Suffolk Police assigned an Ecuador-born officer to work as a liaison between police and the Hispanic community in Patchogue. Some Hispanics say conditions have improved, but advocates have held several news conferences during the trial, contending much work still needs to be done to ease fears.
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5iyOq7mhNW2WjpPOWuAd607cd0xxgD9F68UH80
Showing posts with label Hate Crimes. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Hate Crimes. Show all posts
Monday, April 19, 2010
Friday, September 4, 2009
Report Cites Culture of Ethnic Hatred in Suffolk County
By KIRK SEMPLE
The New York Times
September 3, 2009
HAUPPAUGE, N.Y. — An environment of racial intolerance and ethnic hatred, fostered by anti-immigrant groups and some public officials, has helped fuel dozens of attacks on Latinos in Suffolk County during the past decade, says a report issued Wednesday by the Southern Poverty Law Center, an organization that tracks hate groups around the country.
“Latino immigrants in Suffolk County live in fear,” said the report, which the law center released at a news conference here. “Political leaders in the county have done little to discourage the hatred, and some have actively fanned the flames.”
The law center, based in Montgomery, Ala., came to prominence in the 1970s for anti-discrimination efforts and its legal battles against the Ku Klux Klan. It started looking at Suffolk County after Marcelo Lucero, an Ecuadorean immigrant, was stabbed to death last November in Patchogue. Seven youths, who prosecutors say were driven by prejudice against Latinos, are awaiting trial in that case.
The center’s report is the product of months of investigation on Long Island, including scores of interviews with Latino immigrants and local civic leaders. While it draws heavily on news accounts and public records, center officials said it was the most comprehensive compilation of statements and events showing a pattern of hate crimes in Suffolk that were at least tacitly condoned — if not actively encouraged — by some local leaders.
The center’s investigators made “frightening” discoveries, the report said: “Although Lucero’s murder represented the apex of anti-immigration violence in Suffolk County to date, it was hardly an isolated incident.”
Many Latino immigrants in Suffolk say they have been beaten with baseball bats and other objects, attacked with BB guns and pepper spray, and been the victims of arson, the report said. Latinos, it added, are frequently run off the road while riding bicycles or pelted with objects hurled from cars.
On Aug. 15, after the center’s report had been printed, an Ecuadorean man in Patchogue was attacked by three men who used racial epithets as they kicked and punched him, the police said. The three were arrested, and two were charged with assault as a bias crime, Newsday reported.
On Aug. 20, a man in Smithtown told a mother and a daughter who wore traditional Islamic garb that he was going to “chop you into little pieces and kill you,” the police said. The man was charged with second-degree aggravated harassment, the Associated Press reported.
And on Wednesday, the police said, hate-crimes detectives were investigating a burglary Tuesday night at a Latino evangelical church in Patchogue, in which notes with anti-Hispanic comments were found on the altar.
The law center report, echoing often-repeated statements by advocates for immigrants, accused the Suffolk County executive, Steve Levy, of helping to create an atmosphere of anti-immigrant sentiment by taking a hard line against illegal immigration.
In a statement on Wednesday, Mr. Levy said, “While we can continue to disagree about policies related to the economic and social impacts of illegal immigration, we can all agree that any violence against a fellow human being cannot and will not be tolerated.” In the past, Mr. Levy has repeatedly denied accusations that he has fomented bias.
The report pointed to a statement by Michael M. D’Andre, a county legislator from Smithtown, at a 2001 hearing on a bill to penalize contractors who hire undocumented workers. Mr. D’Andre said that if his town were “attacked” by an influx of Hispanic day laborers, “we’ll be up in arms, we’ll be out with baseball bats.” He apologized the following week for his remark.
The report also highlighted a comment by Elie Mystal, a county legislator from Amityville, who said during a hearing in 2007 that if day laborers started gathering in his neighborhood, “I would load my gun and start shooting, period.” He later apologized and said he had been joking, according to news media reports.
Mr. D’Andre and Mr. Mystal are no longer legislators.
The report said Latinos’ fears were fed by nativist groups like Sachem Quality of Life, a local organization that has disbanded.
After Mr. Lucero’s death, many immigrants in the county stepped forward to describe their attacks to the police and media. In some of the cases, the allegations were reported to the police at the time the assaults occurred, but no arrests were made, in part because language barriers made communication difficult, the authorities have said.
Law center officials said that according to immigrants they interviewed, there may have been another reason for the inaction: police indifference.
Many immigrants told center investigators that the “police did not take their reports of attacks seriously, often blaming the victim,” the report said. “They said there’s little point in going to the police, who are often not interested in their plight and instead demand to know their immigration status.”
The Suffolk County police commissioner, Richard Dormer, said in a statement, “Some of the report had concrete ideas, most of which we are already implementing, but other parts were rife with inaccuracies due to the law center’s failure to interview the Police Department, the district attorney or elected officials.”
The report urged officials to adopt measures including halting “their angry demagoguery” about immigration, promoting programs that encourage respect for diversity, and training police officers to take seriously all allegations of hate-motivated crime.
“If these measures are taken to combat an increasingly volatile situation,” the report said, “it’s likely that angry passions in Suffolk can be cooled and a rational debate on immigration and its consequences begun.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/03/nyregion/03suffolk.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=suffolk%20county&st=cse
The New York Times
September 3, 2009
HAUPPAUGE, N.Y. — An environment of racial intolerance and ethnic hatred, fostered by anti-immigrant groups and some public officials, has helped fuel dozens of attacks on Latinos in Suffolk County during the past decade, says a report issued Wednesday by the Southern Poverty Law Center, an organization that tracks hate groups around the country.
“Latino immigrants in Suffolk County live in fear,” said the report, which the law center released at a news conference here. “Political leaders in the county have done little to discourage the hatred, and some have actively fanned the flames.”
The law center, based in Montgomery, Ala., came to prominence in the 1970s for anti-discrimination efforts and its legal battles against the Ku Klux Klan. It started looking at Suffolk County after Marcelo Lucero, an Ecuadorean immigrant, was stabbed to death last November in Patchogue. Seven youths, who prosecutors say were driven by prejudice against Latinos, are awaiting trial in that case.
The center’s report is the product of months of investigation on Long Island, including scores of interviews with Latino immigrants and local civic leaders. While it draws heavily on news accounts and public records, center officials said it was the most comprehensive compilation of statements and events showing a pattern of hate crimes in Suffolk that were at least tacitly condoned — if not actively encouraged — by some local leaders.
The center’s investigators made “frightening” discoveries, the report said: “Although Lucero’s murder represented the apex of anti-immigration violence in Suffolk County to date, it was hardly an isolated incident.”
Many Latino immigrants in Suffolk say they have been beaten with baseball bats and other objects, attacked with BB guns and pepper spray, and been the victims of arson, the report said. Latinos, it added, are frequently run off the road while riding bicycles or pelted with objects hurled from cars.
On Aug. 15, after the center’s report had been printed, an Ecuadorean man in Patchogue was attacked by three men who used racial epithets as they kicked and punched him, the police said. The three were arrested, and two were charged with assault as a bias crime, Newsday reported.
On Aug. 20, a man in Smithtown told a mother and a daughter who wore traditional Islamic garb that he was going to “chop you into little pieces and kill you,” the police said. The man was charged with second-degree aggravated harassment, the Associated Press reported.
And on Wednesday, the police said, hate-crimes detectives were investigating a burglary Tuesday night at a Latino evangelical church in Patchogue, in which notes with anti-Hispanic comments were found on the altar.
The law center report, echoing often-repeated statements by advocates for immigrants, accused the Suffolk County executive, Steve Levy, of helping to create an atmosphere of anti-immigrant sentiment by taking a hard line against illegal immigration.
In a statement on Wednesday, Mr. Levy said, “While we can continue to disagree about policies related to the economic and social impacts of illegal immigration, we can all agree that any violence against a fellow human being cannot and will not be tolerated.” In the past, Mr. Levy has repeatedly denied accusations that he has fomented bias.
The report pointed to a statement by Michael M. D’Andre, a county legislator from Smithtown, at a 2001 hearing on a bill to penalize contractors who hire undocumented workers. Mr. D’Andre said that if his town were “attacked” by an influx of Hispanic day laborers, “we’ll be up in arms, we’ll be out with baseball bats.” He apologized the following week for his remark.
The report also highlighted a comment by Elie Mystal, a county legislator from Amityville, who said during a hearing in 2007 that if day laborers started gathering in his neighborhood, “I would load my gun and start shooting, period.” He later apologized and said he had been joking, according to news media reports.
Mr. D’Andre and Mr. Mystal are no longer legislators.
The report said Latinos’ fears were fed by nativist groups like Sachem Quality of Life, a local organization that has disbanded.
After Mr. Lucero’s death, many immigrants in the county stepped forward to describe their attacks to the police and media. In some of the cases, the allegations were reported to the police at the time the assaults occurred, but no arrests were made, in part because language barriers made communication difficult, the authorities have said.
Law center officials said that according to immigrants they interviewed, there may have been another reason for the inaction: police indifference.
Many immigrants told center investigators that the “police did not take their reports of attacks seriously, often blaming the victim,” the report said. “They said there’s little point in going to the police, who are often not interested in their plight and instead demand to know their immigration status.”
The Suffolk County police commissioner, Richard Dormer, said in a statement, “Some of the report had concrete ideas, most of which we are already implementing, but other parts were rife with inaccuracies due to the law center’s failure to interview the Police Department, the district attorney or elected officials.”
The report urged officials to adopt measures including halting “their angry demagoguery” about immigration, promoting programs that encourage respect for diversity, and training police officers to take seriously all allegations of hate-motivated crime.
“If these measures are taken to combat an increasingly volatile situation,” the report said, “it’s likely that angry passions in Suffolk can be cooled and a rational debate on immigration and its consequences begun.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/03/nyregion/03suffolk.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=suffolk%20county&st=cse
Tuesday, November 11, 2008
A Death in Patchogue
A Death in Patchogue
November 11, 2008
New York Times Editorial
Marcello Lucero was killed late Saturday night near the commuter railroad station in Patchogue, N.Y., a middle-class village in central Long Island. He was beaten and stabbed. The friend who crouched beside him in a parking lot as he lay dying, soaked in blood, said Mr. Lucero, who was 37, had come to the United States 16 years ago from Ecuador.
The police arrested seven teenage boys, who they said had driven into the village from out of town looking for Latinos to beat up. The police said the mob cornered Mr. Lucero and another man, who escaped and later identified the suspects to the police. A prosecutor at the arraignment on Monday quoted the young men as having said: “Let’s go find some Mexicans.” They have pleaded not guilty.
The county executive, Steve Levy, quickly issued a news release denouncing this latest apparent hate crime in Suffolk County. That should be the first and least of the actions he and other leaders take.
A possible lynching in a New York suburb should be more than enough to force this country to acknowledge the bitter chill that has overcome Latinos in these days of rage against illegal immigration.
The atmosphere began to darken when Republican politicians decided a few years ago to exploit immigration as a wedge issue. They drafted harsh legislation to criminalize the undocumented.
They cheered as vigilantes streamed to the border to confront the concocted crisis of Spanish-speaking workers sneaking in to steal jobs and spread diseases. Cable personalities and radio talk-show hosts latched on to the issue. Years of effort in Congress to assemble a responsible overhaul of the immigration system failed repeatedly. Its opponents wanted only to demonize and punish the Latino workers on which the country had come to depend.
A campaign of raids and deportations, led by federal agents with help from state and local posses, has become so pervasive that nearly 1 in 10 Latinos, including citizens and legal immigrants, have told of being stopped and asked about their immigration status, according to the Pew Hispanic Center. Now that the economy is in free fall, the possibility of scapegoating is deepening Hispanic anxiety.
It is not yet clear how closely connected Mr. Lucero’s murder is to this broad wave of xenophobia. But there is both a message and opportunity here for officials like Mr. Levy, an immigration hard-liner whose relations with his rapidly growing Latino immigrant constituency have been strained by past crises and confrontations.
Deadly violence represents the worst fear that immigrants deal with every day, but it is not the only one. It must be every leader’s task to move beyond easy outrage and take on the difficult job of understanding and defending a community so vulnerable to sudden outbreaks of hostility and terror.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/11/opinion/11tue3.html?_r=1&ref=opinion&oref=slogin
November 11, 2008
New York Times Editorial
Marcello Lucero was killed late Saturday night near the commuter railroad station in Patchogue, N.Y., a middle-class village in central Long Island. He was beaten and stabbed. The friend who crouched beside him in a parking lot as he lay dying, soaked in blood, said Mr. Lucero, who was 37, had come to the United States 16 years ago from Ecuador.
The police arrested seven teenage boys, who they said had driven into the village from out of town looking for Latinos to beat up. The police said the mob cornered Mr. Lucero and another man, who escaped and later identified the suspects to the police. A prosecutor at the arraignment on Monday quoted the young men as having said: “Let’s go find some Mexicans.” They have pleaded not guilty.
The county executive, Steve Levy, quickly issued a news release denouncing this latest apparent hate crime in Suffolk County. That should be the first and least of the actions he and other leaders take.
A possible lynching in a New York suburb should be more than enough to force this country to acknowledge the bitter chill that has overcome Latinos in these days of rage against illegal immigration.
The atmosphere began to darken when Republican politicians decided a few years ago to exploit immigration as a wedge issue. They drafted harsh legislation to criminalize the undocumented.
They cheered as vigilantes streamed to the border to confront the concocted crisis of Spanish-speaking workers sneaking in to steal jobs and spread diseases. Cable personalities and radio talk-show hosts latched on to the issue. Years of effort in Congress to assemble a responsible overhaul of the immigration system failed repeatedly. Its opponents wanted only to demonize and punish the Latino workers on which the country had come to depend.
A campaign of raids and deportations, led by federal agents with help from state and local posses, has become so pervasive that nearly 1 in 10 Latinos, including citizens and legal immigrants, have told of being stopped and asked about their immigration status, according to the Pew Hispanic Center. Now that the economy is in free fall, the possibility of scapegoating is deepening Hispanic anxiety.
It is not yet clear how closely connected Mr. Lucero’s murder is to this broad wave of xenophobia. But there is both a message and opportunity here for officials like Mr. Levy, an immigration hard-liner whose relations with his rapidly growing Latino immigrant constituency have been strained by past crises and confrontations.
Deadly violence represents the worst fear that immigrants deal with every day, but it is not the only one. It must be every leader’s task to move beyond easy outrage and take on the difficult job of understanding and defending a community so vulnerable to sudden outbreaks of hostility and terror.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/11/opinion/11tue3.html?_r=1&ref=opinion&oref=slogin
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