Alkotait accepted a plea agreement on second-degree murder. Judge Michael Hathaway sentenced Alkotait to 18-20 years in prison in connection of the 2013 robbery, murder and burning of the body of Gavino Rodriguez who was targeted because he was gay.
A 45-year-old man convicted in the 1999 hate crime murder of Billy Jack Gaither has been killed in an Alabama prison.
Steven Eric Mullins [photo] was found unresponsive Feb. 26 at St. Clair Correctional Facility, Alabama Department of Corrections officials announced Monday.
The Department of Corrections’ Investigations and Intelligence Division is filing capital murder charges against 50-year-old Christopher Scott Jones who is a suspect in the fatal stabbing.
Mullins was serving a life sentence without parole. His alleged killer is a serving a 25-year sentence for five murders in 2008.
The murder of Billy Jack Gaither spawned a push for LGBT-inclusion in hate crime laws in some states, including Alabama.
Every year there has been an annual vigil to celebrate Billy Jack Gaither’s life, mourn his death, and remember all the victims of hate & violence on the steps of the Alabama State Capitol.
Serial killer Bruce McArthur, who killed and dismembered at least 8 gay men he met in Toronto’s Gay Village district, was sentenced on Friday to life in prison with no chance for parole for 25 years.
Justice John McMahon called the 67 year-old McArthur a sexual predator who killed for his own “warped sick gratification” and said the victims suffered slow and painful deaths. He called their dismemberments pure evil, and said that McArthur’s guilty plea spared a jury four months of graphic and gruesome evidence that would have likely required counseling after.
“All or most of the victims were vulnerable individuals who were lured to their death,” Justice McMahon said. “The accused exploited his victims’ vulnerabilities, whether they involved immigration concerns, mental health challenges, or people living a secretive double life.
The Guardian reported: “The court heard heard that McArthur staged photographs of his victims’ corpses, posing the bodies in a fur coat and black leather hat, and – in two cases – with a cigar between their lips. and that McArthur kept photographs of his victims – many of them taken while they were alive. McArthur also shaved and stored the facial hair from his victims,
McArthur was in the middle of a ninth murder when police knocked on his door, The Independent reports: “Police, who had been monitoring the 67-year-old landscape gardener as a potential suspect, moved in for fears another murder was about to take place. When they arrived, they found McArthur had chained the man – identified in court only as John – to a four-poster bed and placed a black bag over his head. He was taping his victim’s mouth shut at the moment police knocked.”
McArthur pleaded guilty to killing Andrew Kinsman, Selim Esen, Majeed Kayhan, Dean Lisowick, Soroush Mahmudi, Skandaraj Navaratnam, Abdulbasir Faizi and Kirushna Kanagaratnam.
JMcMahon said that even if McArthur lives to 91, the chances of him getting parole are remote at best.
White nationalist James Alex Fields Jr. on Tuesday was sentenced to life in prison, plus 419 years, after being convicted of murdering anti-racism protester Heather Heyer during the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville.
Fields, a 21-year-old Ohio native, received his life sentence just days after being convicted of first-degree murder for the vehicular rampage, which killed Heyer, 32, and injured dozens of other people protesting against the white-nationalist rally.
In total, Fields was convicted Friday on ten charges, including five counts of aggravated malicious wounding, three counts of malicious wounding, and one count of failing to stop at an accident involving a death. Six of those counts had a maximum sentence of life in prison.
The Miami Herald reports that today that the four men: Pablo Reinaldo Romo-Figueroa, 21, Luis Alonso-Piovet, 20, Juan C. Lopez, 21, and Adonis Diaz, 21 will be charged under Florida’s hate-crime enhancement law..
The group was charged with aggravated battery committed with prejudice, which means each could face up to 30 years in prison if convicted of the attack that took place during Miami Beach’s annual gay-pride parade.”
Under Florida law, aggravated battery is normally a second-degree felony, punishable by up to 15 years in prison. But if it’s committed because of someone’s sexual orientation, the crime becomes a first-degree felony, punishable by up to 30 years in prison.”
A day after the attack, Miami Beach police released surveillance video of the attack which went viral and was played on many mainstream and gay media outlets.
The widow of Pulse nightclub gunman Omar Mateen will stand trial in Orlando, home to the nation’s second deadliest mass shooting in modern history, after a federal judge ruled staying in the city wouldn’t prevent a fair trial.
Lawyers for Noor Salman had fought to move the case outside the city, arguing intense media coverage of the shooting could prompt bias in potential jurors. U.S. District Judge Paul Byron denied the request, court documents show.
Salman has been behind bars for nearly a year since her January arrest. She’s facing federal charges of obstruction of justice and aiding and abetting by providing material support to a terrorist organization. If convicted, Salman could face life in prison.
Venue changes are rare, and the burden on the accused is heavy. Even Boston Marathon bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was denied a change of venue. He is appealing his convictions and death sentence, arguing the judge in his case should have moved his trial.
The German government Wednesday approved plans to quash the convictions of 50,000 men sentenced for homosexuality under a Nazi-era law which remained in force after the war, and offer compensation.
The measure marks a triumph for activists after a decades-long struggle to clear the names of gay men who lived with a criminal record under Article 175 of the penal code. An estimated 5,000 of those found guilty are still alive.
The legislation was passed by Chancellor Angela Merkel’s cabinet and will soon head to parliament, where her ruling right-left coalition enjoys a large majority. “Article 175 destroyed careers and ruined lives,” Justice Minister Heiko Maas said in a statement. “The few victims who are still alive today deserve to finally have justice.”
The measure follows Britain’s so-called “Turing Law” approved in October, which offered pardons to thousands of men convicted of homosexuality before its decriminalisation in 1967. The legislation was named after World War II hero Alan Turing who was prosecuted under the law in 1952 and forced to undergo chemical castration treatment. He committed suicide two years later at the age of 41.
However the British measure, unlike Germany’s, only automatically pardoned dead people while the living must still make an individual application to have their names cleared. It also failed to provide compensation.
The Nazis believed that male homosexuals were weak, effeminate men who could not fight for the German nation. They saw homosexuals as unlikely to produce children and increase the German birthrate. The Nazis held that inferior races produced more children than “Aryans,” so anything that diminished Germany’s reproductive potential was considered a racial danger.
The police had powers to hold in protective custody or preventive arrest those deemed dangerous to Germany’s moral fiber, jailing indefinitely—without trial—anyone they chose. In addition, homosexual prisoners just released from jail were immediately re-arrested and sent to concentration camps if the police thought it likely that they would continue to engage in homosexual acts.
From 1937 to 1939, the peak years of the Nazi persecution of homosexuals, the police increasingly raided homosexual meeting places, seized address books, and created networks of informers and undercover agents to identify and arrest suspected homosexuals. On April 4, 1938, the Gestapo issued a directive indicating that men convicted of homosexuality could be incarcerated in concentration camps. Between 1933 and 1945 the police arrested over 100,000 men as homosexuals.
The sinister Paragraph 175 was in effect until 1969. Even after the concentration camps were liberated gay prisoners would be sent to sent to regular prisons to finish out the terms of their sentences.
Learn more about paragraph 175 and watch the award winning documentary of the same name by clicking HERE
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In the past 8 years we have tried to educate our readers by remembering our gay history and motivate them into action by reminding them that our future and equality relies on our continual fight until we archive our goal.
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Just a little over a year ago on May 5th, 2015, Jonathan Snipes and Ethan York-Adams were dining at the Dallas BBQ at West 23rd Street and 8th Avenue. Snipes knocked over his fishbowl margarita drink, and overheard Bayna Lekheim El-Amin say he was “a white faggot spilling drinks.” A tipsy Snipes confronted him, and later admitting to hitting him with his “light purse”. A fight ensured with the much larger El-Amin stomping on Stipes and then bashing him over the head with a heavy wooden chair, knocking him unconscious while he was walking away. El-Amin then left the restaurant and went underground only to surrender himself to the authorities a few months later. The whole confrontation was caught on videotape.
On Wednesday Bayna Lekheim El-Amin was convicted of two counts of first-degree attempted assault and two counts of second-degree assault
El-Amin’s lawyer unsuccessfully argued that his client, who they made a point of stating is also gay, was acting in self-defense. “The defendant has a right to defend (himself),” he told the jury.
Prosecutors said El-Amin attacked out of rage: “The defendant didn’t attack these men because he was scared for his life — he attacked them because Jonathan Snipes humiliated him and he was pissed off. The defendant was angry, he was humiliated, and he wasn’t about to let these girly men get the last word,” said ADA Leah Saxtein
NYPD Chief of Detectives Robert Boyce describes El Amin a “career criminal.”
A cursory internet search reveals several clues into El-Amin’s criminal past. In 2005, he was arrested for violating probation and for failure to appear in court. In 2006, he was locked up for about three months on a forgery charge and was also arrested fo: invasion of privacy, credit card fraud, a violation of Georgia Controlled Substance Act, and a miscellaneous misdemeanor according to Mugshots.com, That site lists his height at 6’6” and his weight at 325 lbs.
Waddie Grant Jr. owner of the QPOC website G-List has been a supporter of El-Amin since the incident claiming that El Amin was actually the victim charging racial discrimination and that El-Amin was a victim of “white privilege” mistreated by the press. Grant also knew the whereabouts of El-Amin while he was in hiding and a search warrant was issued and never contacted the NYPD.
Grant allowed El-Amin a platform to speak on his website. In his account of the story, York-Adams and Snipes never spilled a drink but got into a fight near a table where a few women were seated. El-Amin says he shouted:
‘Hey, guys! There are ladies here’…. Snipes…walked towards me and said, ‘And YOU calling us ladies!’ And, he struck me. He struck me in the head with an object. I’m not sure what it was, but it felt like a heavy blunt object — and it hurt….I knew that I needed to react quickly because I was afraid that if I didn’t that I would be hit again. Or, someone else at my table would have been hit. So, I immediately went at him.
El-Amin is expected to be sentenced on June 14 by Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Arlene Goldberg. He faces up to 15 years in prison.
The New York Daily News is reporting that Elliot Morales has been found GUILTY of the hate crime murder of of 32-year-old Mark Carson last year in front of Ray’s Pizza on West 8th Street.
A crazed killer was convicted Wednesday of gunning down an unarmed gay man in the West Village nearly three years ago — and the murder was deemed a hate crime. Elliot Morales, 36, now faces up to life in prison for the murder of 32-year-old Mark Carson around midnight on May 18, 2013, on W. Eighth St.
A jury decided in about a day of deliberations in Manhattan Supreme Court that the crime was motivated by a hateful bias against a gay person. Morales argued at trial that he did not mean to hit Mark Carson when he fired the gun and that he felt threatened by Carson and his pal Danny Robinson. He also claimed he was bombed after a day of drinking Four Lokos, rum and vodka.
“Gun violence and the hate that fuels it have no place in New York City,” said District Attorney Cyrus R. Vance Jr. “Motivated by irrational rage, the defendant targeted and executed a defenseless young man based on his sexual orientation after taunting and insulting the victim and his companion. Elliot Morales’s hateful and destructive rampage may not have stopped there, if not for the intervention of an NYPD officer. When those intent on doing harm have access to guns, any situation can escalate to deadly levels in a matter of seconds, and I thank the jury for their service and recognition of this heinous crime.”
