Death of Pennsylvania Immigrant Ruled Hate Crime

The 2008 death of Mexican immigrant Luis Ramirez was ruled a hate crime this week.  The two defendants, Brandon Piekarsky and Derrick Donchak, found them guilty of violating the Fair Housing Act.

The reason it took two years to get a conviction is because an all-white jury in a state court in Pennsylvania initially acquitted the two on homicide and ethnic intimidation charges.  Then, in 2009 after revelations of evidence tampering by investigators, the two were indicted by a federal grand jury on the hate crime charges.

According to The Cyprus Times:

“The jury found the defendants guilty of violating the criminal component of the federal Fair Housing Act, which makes it a crime to use a person’s race, national origin or ethnicity as a basis to interfere, with violence or threats of violence, with a person’s right to live where he chooses to live. In addition, the jury found that Donchak conspired to, and did in fact, obstruct justice.

During the trial, the jury heard evidence from multiple eyewitnesses that the defendants, aided and abetted each other and some of their friends in fatally beating Luis Ramirez because he was Latino and because they did not want Latinos living in Shenandoah.”

The bigger issue with things like this and Arizona’s SB1070 is that it affects all Latinos, or people who even “seem” Latino, without discrimination.  You might be Filippino or Indian or swarthy and, if someone doesn’t like the way you “look,” you too might fall victim to their violence or hate.

Even conservative, pro-enforcement Latinos that I know seem to miss this point.  They ask, “Don’t we have a right to protect our borders?” or say, “Well, they broke the law.”  Yes, those things are both true.  It would be nice if we lived in a world where it was that simple, but what is simple I think to myself, is that your wife better not travel to Arizona — at least not without papers — or Pennsylvania, for that matter.