According to an article from fox news two teenagers from Pottsville Pennsylvania were acquitted of third-degree murder, aggravated assault and ethnic intimidation charges yesterday. The teens were accused of beating a Mexican immigrant to death and Prosecutors called the “beating death of an illegal immigrant from Mexico a hate crime”. Not only did these two teens get acquitted but the jury was an all-white jury in Pennsylvania coal country. I thought that jury’s couldn’t be all the same race because of bias, but I guess this didn’t matter because it happened in Pennsylvania and not New York. Images are from fox news.
Brandon Piekarsky, who is 17, was acquitted of third-degree murder and ethnic intimidation. Derrick Donchak, who is 19, was acquitted of aggravated assault and ethnic intimidation. Both teenagers were convicted of simple assault. Both brutally beat the 25-year-old Hispanic man, Luis Ramirez, and were only charged with a simple assault. A representative of the Ramirez’s family states that these jurors got it wrong. Glady’s Limon who is the staff attorney for the Mexican American Legal Defense and
Education Fund, was at the trial and informed the Ramirez’s family of the verdict is outraged by the outcome of this case. She says, "There's been a complete failure of justice...It's just outrageous and very difficult to understand how any juror could have had reasonable doubt…clearly established that Luis Ramirez was brutally beaten."The case brought ethnic tensions in Shenandoah PA, which is described as “a blue-collar town of 5,000 that has lured Hispanic residents drawn by cheap housing and jobs in nearby factories and farm fields”. The 2000 U.S. Census showed that Schuylkill County's population was “96.6 percent white, with 1.1 percent of the county listed as Hispanic or Latino” meaning most people haven’t even seen a non-white person.
This is insane how people today are still being racist we are in 2009 why do people still hate other people. Is it because he wasn’t a citizen or because he didn’t have the same color skin as them? Also how is it possible to have an all white jury especially when there is a hate crime at hand? It just makes me think how corrupt our legal system still is along with all the other problems our country has right now. I think these kids should have gotten more of a sentence instead with a slap on the wrist which is basically what they got. It makes me wonder if they didn’t happen in Bumblefuck PA and it happened in a major city like NY, if these kids would have gotten the same sentence or a different one.
