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Framingham thug admits to South End gay bashing
By adamg on Wed, 05/27/2009 - 2:33pm
The man charged with helping to beat four people walking down Columbus Avenue last Aug. 24 today pleaded guilty to nine charges against him - four for civil-rights violations - the Suffolk County District Attorney's office announced.
Fabio Brandao, 29, a Framingham pizza delivery guy, called the three men and one woman "faggots" as he and three of his pals punched and kicked them early that morning. The other three men remain at large; Brandao was caught in part because the victims took down the license plate of the vehicle the four got out of to attack them - which belonged to Brandao.
Boston Municipal Court Judge Thomas C. Horgan rejected prosecutors' request that Brandao spend six months in jail, instead giving him a two-year suspended sentence. The judge did agree with the DA's request that Brandao be ordered to pay his victims' medical bills, complete an anger-management program and stay out of the South End.
In a statement, the DA's office reported statements by two of Brandao's victims, one of whom said he still bears scars, even after he had stitches taken out of his face:
"Every time I look in the mirror, that's what I see," he said. "I had to leave the city. My whole life has been turned upside down."
Another victim rued the faith she had in her fellow citizens.
"I was really naive to believe that there was good in everyone," she said. "I can't walk down the street by myself anymore."
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Comments
sad
How sad that he received no jail time for four hate crimes and NOT turning in his accomplices. Six months was not enough...a slap on the wrist is definitely not enough.
'Scuse me?
Stay away from the South End??? So it won't trigger another anti-gay rampage?
Could we get a couple of our legal eagles to weigh in on this sentence? For a crime not of property, but the physical assault on four people, the intended message to all the "faggots" they represent, and the refusal to identify his accomplices, my gut says this sentence is WAY too lenient.
Reading the comments on the Globe report, this exchange nails it, I think (bold mine):
Yeah, good catch
Doing stupid things because of anger is within the range of fairly normal human responses, and these people usually have a decent amount of insight and can make huge progress in therapy.
People who, while perfectly calm, attack people because they believe they are inferior humans, well, those people are usually psychopaths, and while we now believe that they're pretty much born with faulty brain wiring, we also know that insight-based therapies (like anger management groups) don't have much effect for them. Why are judges not trained in basic mental health principles?
(Also, I think that failing to identify accomplices should always carry a pretty heavy sentence. The person who keeps quiet is acting negligently in a way that has huge potential to cause harm to others. They should get at least as harsh of treatment as I would as a clinician if I fail to do something about someone who I feel is likely to harm someone. Especially given that they've seen the people act violently, so there isn't even the factor of having to judge how likely they are to do violent stuff.)
http://1smootshort.blogspot.com
What's all this we have been hearing ...
about the need for judges to have empathy? (empathy meaning "a sense of clue about the lives of people not like themselves, who they are likely to encounter a lot of in their determinations of justice")
Right, but...
..."empathy" in this sense often gets construed as meaning that "empathic judges make sure to give really light sentences in the event that the perp is poor/brown/uneducated regardless of what type of crime it was or the likelihood that said perp will do it again." I mostly hear the term used to refer to judges who aren't doing their jobs. Gah.
http://1smootshort.blogspot.com
Why do I get the feeling
that Judge Thomas C. Horgan doesn't have a lot of respect for the gay community?
Maybe he and his buddies at the West Roxbury Lions Club (where he is a member, according to his judicial profile) don't have too much contact with the gays? Perhaps, even, they just don't like the gays?
The leniency of this sentence shows that to a certain population of older white males, hate crimes, at least when perpetrated against gays, is just not that important.
If you are as disgusted by this sentence as I am, then call the judge's office at the Boston Municipal Court (617-788-8700) and let them know that this sentence is unacceptable.
Maybe jumping to conclusions, but maybe not
I also get the sense that the Lions are a pretty straight older white male sort of group, and I don't get the sense that they do a lot to be active GLBT allies. However, I've not heard anything about officially sanctioned homophobia from the Lions (the Knights of Columbus are the fraternal organization that immediately comes to mind for spending millions of dollars to make sure GLBT folks aren't given any civil rights).
It does kind of seem to me that this judge is homophobic, yes. And also seems to lack some basic knowledge of human behavior (see my other comment on this thread). But I wouldn't go as far as tying the Lions into this unless I had more evidence.
(Oh, BTW, there are GLBT Lions clubs. So the organization as a whole appears to not to have homophobic official views. Whether there's institutionalized homophobia, I don't know.)
http://1smootshort.blogspot.com
This makes me puke a little.
This makes me puke a little. Suspended sentence for what amounts to a hate crime? Sickening.