Iowa Police: Deadly Assault of Teen Not Considered a Hate Crime

Police in Waterloo, Iowa, say they’re not considering the death of Marcellus Andrews a hate crime, despite the anti-gay slurs shouted at the teen before he was brutally assaulted on Aug. 19.

Andrews, 19, died on Aug. 21 after suffering from severe head trauma incurred during his attack by a mob.

The Waterloo-Cedar Falls Courier reported that witnesses heard Andrews’ assailants calling him “faggot” and “Mercedes”—feminizing his first name—prompting gay rights group OneIowa to release a statement condemning the anti-gay rhetoric and mourning Andrews’s death.

For Andrews’s beating to be considered a hate crime under Iowa law, Waterloo Police Chief Dan Trelka told Campus Progress, it must have been committed because of his perceived or actual orientation. While there were anti-gay slurs involved, police say there is no evidence that a particular bias was involved and Andrews’ sexual orientation has not been confirmed.

In 2009, the FBI recorded 1,436 hate-crime incidents based on sexual orientation. These were reported by police departments only when there was “sufficient evidence to lead a reasonable and prudent person to conclude that the offender’s actions were motivated, in whole or in part, by his or her bias,” according to the FBI’s web site.

“A lot of derogatory terms were shouted [in the attack],” Trelka said.

But police told the Iowa Independent the fatal brawl seemed to result from a history of enmity between the two parties.

The Matthew Shepard Act, signed into law by President Obama in 2009, expanded existing hate crime legislation to include victims targeted because of sexual orientation or gender identity. And Iowa law has included sexual orientation in its hate crime definition since 2002.

But the Andrews case highlights the difficulty of determining when a sexual orientation-based hate crime has occurred.

Unlike other categories protected under hate crime laws—such as race, gender, and disability—the common use of “gay” and more offensive homophobic slurs as simple insults, regardless of the sexual orientation of those involved, further obscures the point at which an assault becomes a hate crime. That makes it difficult to discern whether attacks were motivated by anti-gay bias, or whether slurs were used as generic taunting.

Waterloo police know who was involved in the beating, but they are still deciding which charges to bring against Andrews’ assailants.

Meanwhile, civil rights advocates are circling the wagons.

Even if the attack was not motivated by Andrews’s sexual orientation, the involvement of anti-gay slurs is prompting a renewed call for the struggle against homophobia and bullying. The director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Iowa, Ben Stone, issued a statement about Andrews’s death:

“Whether the ultimate charges brought include an allegation of a hate crime, it appears from information reported in the media that the violence of that night was accompanied by anti-gay hatred and prejudice.”

Even in cases that are explicitly motivated by bias, it’s frequently hard to convict people for hate crimes; not only are defendants innocent until proven guilty of the crime, they are also innocent of a hate motive until proven otherwise, beyond a reasonable doubt.

In March, a Washington, DC man charged with murder attempted to claim that he was afraid the victim was going to rape him—a defense reminiscent of the “gay panic” invoked in past anti-gay assaults. The jury convicted him of murder, but declined to convict him of a hate crime, even though he’d called the victim a “faggot.”

Pervasive anti-gay rhetoric confounds the prosecution of hate crimes. Incidents like the Andrews attack in Iowa may not represent a culture that condones anti-gay violence, but they represent a youth culture steeped in homophobia where anti-gay slurs are just another way of provoking a fight.

Shay O'Reilly is a staff writer with Campus Progress. Follow him on Twitter @shaygabriel.

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