WASHINGTON—Everett Dwayne Avery, 26, of Detroit, was
sentenced today by U.S. District Judge John Corbett O’Meara after
pleading guilty to committing a hate crime by assaulting a man because
the man was gay. Avery was sentenced to serve 18 months in prison, to be
followed by three years of supervised release.
The assault occurred on March, 7, 2011, while Avery and the victim were at a convenience store in Detroit. Avery used anti-gay slurs toward the victim as Avery and the victim waited in line in the convenience store. Shortly after the first slurs, while still in the store, Avery used another anti-gay slur and punched the victim in the face, fracturing the victim’s eye socket. Avery pled guilty to violating the federal Hate Crimes Protection Act on August 29, 2012.
“Hate-fueled incidents like this one have no place in a civilized society,” said Thomas E. Perez, Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division. “The Justice Department is committed to using all the tools in our law enforcement arsenal, including the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act, to prosecute acts motivated by hate.”
“Congress has made it clear that it is a crime to assault people solely on the basis of their sexual orientation. Prosecutions under this law are important to ensure that all people in our community know that they have the full protection of the law,” said U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan Barbara McQuade.
Special Agent in Charge Foley stated, “Hate crimes have no place in a civilized society. We are a nation of laws, and our laws embrace diversity and differences. The law does not tolerate the type of hate demonstrated in this matter, and the FBI will investigate and put forth for prosecution a violation of that law.”
The case was investigated by the FBI. The case was prosecuted by Assistant U.S. Attorney Pamela Thompson from the U.S. Attorney’s Office and Trial Attorney Sanjay Patel from the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice.
The assault occurred on March, 7, 2011, while Avery and the victim were at a convenience store in Detroit. Avery used anti-gay slurs toward the victim as Avery and the victim waited in line in the convenience store. Shortly after the first slurs, while still in the store, Avery used another anti-gay slur and punched the victim in the face, fracturing the victim’s eye socket. Avery pled guilty to violating the federal Hate Crimes Protection Act on August 29, 2012.
“Hate-fueled incidents like this one have no place in a civilized society,” said Thomas E. Perez, Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division. “The Justice Department is committed to using all the tools in our law enforcement arsenal, including the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act, to prosecute acts motivated by hate.”
“Congress has made it clear that it is a crime to assault people solely on the basis of their sexual orientation. Prosecutions under this law are important to ensure that all people in our community know that they have the full protection of the law,” said U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan Barbara McQuade.
Special Agent in Charge Foley stated, “Hate crimes have no place in a civilized society. We are a nation of laws, and our laws embrace diversity and differences. The law does not tolerate the type of hate demonstrated in this matter, and the FBI will investigate and put forth for prosecution a violation of that law.”
The case was investigated by the FBI. The case was prosecuted by Assistant U.S. Attorney Pamela Thompson from the U.S. Attorney’s Office and Trial Attorney Sanjay Patel from the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice.
Hate crime statistics published by the FBI since 1992, based on voluntary reports from law enforcement agencies around the country, have shown annual totals of about 6,000 to 10,000, depending on the year. But the new report, "Hate Crimes Reported by Victims and Police," found an average annual total of 191,000 hate crimes. That means the real level of hate crime runs between 19 and 31 times higher than the numbers that have been officially reported for almost 15 years.
"It's an astounding report," said Jack Levin, a leading hate crime expert at Northeastern University. "It's not necessarily completely accurate, but I would trust these data before I trusted the voluntary law enforcement reports to the FBI."
The revealing new report, compiled by the Bureau of Justice Statistics and published in November, was based on an analysis of three and a half years of detailed survey data from the biannual National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS). The NCVS raw data comes from interviews with almost 80,000 statistically representative people and is the most accurate crime survey extant.
The report, which inferred hate motivation from the words and symbols used by the offender, found that just 44% of hate crimes are reported to police. Other hate crimes don't make it into FBI statistics for an array of reasons: Police may fail to record some as hate crimes; their departments may not report hate crime statistics to state officials; and those officials may not accurately report to the FBI.
According to the new report, hate crimes involve violence far more often than other crimes. The data showed 84% of hate crimes were violent, meaning they involved a sexual attack, robbery, assault or murder. By contrast, just 23% of non-hate crimes involved violence. Other studies have suggested that hate-motivated violence, especially against LGBT people, is more extreme than other violence.
The report also showed that 56% of hate crime victims identified race as the primary factor in the crimes they reported. Ethnicity accounted for another 29% of the total. Hate crimes motivated by sexual orientation were 18% of the total. Given that the best studies indicate about 3% of the American population is homosexual, that means that gays and lesbians are victimized at six times the overall rate.