In a letter addressed to Taylor, Farris and Metrokin criticized the attorney's office's assertion that "Mr. Hunter's death stemmed from an 'altercation' with the defendant that the victim sexually assaulted the defendant prior to the defendant's attacking him." The GLOV representatives called the allegation "absurd," unsupported and against "common sense."

"[G]ay men do not approach random men on street corners and grab their crotches—to believe this version of events, based solely on the self-serving words of someone facing murder charges, is to succumb to homophobic bias," the letter reads.

GLOV's full letter is after the jump.

Jeffery A. Taylor
United States Attorney's Office
555 4th Street, NW
Washington, DC 20530

Dear Mr. Taylor:

We are writing to express our serious concerns about the case being handled by your Office involving the death of Tony Randolph Hunter near 8th and N St, NW. The case is US v. Hanna (there may or may not be an "h" at the end of the name).

Mr. Hunter and a friend of his were brutally attacked by 4 men on September 7 as they were walking to a local gay bar. They had just come from a gospel concert. Mr. Hunter was left in a coma and eventually died. The second victim, as the police report notes, had visible bruising around his face from the attack. The police noted that this was a bias crime in their report, and the police have ruled out robbery as a motive.

There seems to be a conclusion by your office and the MPD (as noted by the Chief of Police's claim at the press conference announcing the arrest that Mr. Hunter's death stemmed from an "altercation" with the defendant) that the victim sexually assaulted the defendant prior to the defendant's attacking him. The only evidence that has been provided to support this absurd allegation are (1) the self-serving words of the defendant and (2) the testimony of someone who is apparently a friend of the defendant.

On the other hand, there is a mountain of evidence against this claim — there are witnesses in the arrest affidavit who claim the attack was random. More importantly, there is the statement by the second victim of the attack. Finally, there is common sense: gay men do not approach random men on street corners and grab their crotches – to believe this version of events, based solely on the self-serving words of someone facing murder charges, is to succumb to homophobic bias. This is especially true in this case, where the allegation is that Mr. Hunter walked up to a group of 4 strangers at night in a dangerous neighborhood on his way into a gay bar with a friend to meet other friends who were waiting for him. It is non-sensical in every way.

The defendant was initially charged with voluntary manslaughter instead of second degree murder, presumably because of the "altercation" that preceded the attack. In relying on testimony and evidence your Office provided at a preliminary hearing in the matter, the judge reduced the charge to involuntary manslaughter, and ordered the defendant – a man clearly responsible for the death of innocent Tony Hunter — released on home arrest. Accordingly, the version being put forth by your Office has real consequences.

We would also note that the arrest warrant makes no mention of the second victim or of the other 3 attackers. In fact, at this point, it is not clear whether anyone in your Office is even looking for the other 3 attackers. More striking, no one from your Office contacted the second victim until after the preliminary hearing — after the judge reduced the charge. This again is non-sensical.

We write to ask that you personally intervene to be sure that this case is being handled appropriately, and that no one in your Office is allowing homophobic prejudices and bias influence their handling of the case or their acceptance of the defendant's version of events. We also write to ask that you be sure someone is looking to take the other three attackers off of our streets.

This murder comes against the backdrop of what appears to be a sharp increase in attacks on the gay and lesbian community in this City. It is urgent that your Office treat the cases that come to you aggressively, fairly, and — most importantly — without bias.

Sincerely,
Chris Farris & Todd Metrokin
Co-Chairmen
GLOV

"This is a very difficult case and a very tragic one," said Weisberg. "It's almost like a law school exam on the elements of homicide." Much of the nearly two-and-a-half hour hearing consisted of the judge and the U.S. attorney arguing the finer points of 2nd degree murder, voluntary manslaughter, and involuntary manslaughter. Detective Middleton was the only witness questioned in the proceedings, but she spoke for four other witnesses, referred to as W-1 to W-4, whom she and lead detective Jed Worrell had interviewed over the course of their investigation. Hannah watched the proceedings in an orange prison jumpsuit and blue skeakers, his wrists handcuffed in front of him.

The difference between voluntary and involuntary manslaughter in the case is a fine one. Under voluntary manslaughter, the offender acts in "the heat of passion" and in response to a "reasonable provocation," but does intend to kill or cause serious physical harm to the victim. In involuntary manslaughter, the offender does not intend to kill, but acts with reckless disregard for the victim's safety. Both differ from second degree murder in that there are "mitigating circumstances" involved in the case.

In Hannah's case, the mitigating circumstance is the allegation, made by Hannah and one other witness, that Tony Hunter approached him and touched his buttocks and genitals, provoking the assault. Campoamor argued that Hunter's "provocation was insufficient" to justify the assault, while Harvey argued that Hannah's response was "reasonable" and "in self-defense." In the courtroom, the fact that Hunter sexually assault Hannah was not disputed by either party, though Detective Middleton did note testimony from one witness who indicated the assault was unprovoked.

Beyond the alleged sexual assault, gender and sexual orientation were discussed only briefly in the proceedings. "If Mr. Hannah were a woman . . . If someone assaulted a woman and she punched him, no one would argue that that was not a reasonable response," Harvey said. Later, Harvey argued that Hannah's motivation to attack Hunter was reasonable based on the figures involved in the case. Hannah was a "teenage boy" responding to a sexual threat from an "older man . . . at least his size," she said. Weisberg said he didn't think gender or sexual orientation were factors in the case. "It's either self-defense or it's two assaults," he said, indicating the two scenarios that will likely be argued in the trial.

UPDATE: According to the office of U.S. Attorney's Office spokesperson Channing Phillips, Hannah will first be placed into a "halfway house" and will later be considered for placement within the D.C. Pretrial Services Agency's High Intensity Supervision Program, or HISP, "if and when he's eligible." You can read more about HISP here [PDF]

On the books, it's "Voluntary Manslaughter." To activists, it's a "Hate Crime."

D.C. didn't know much about Tony Randolph Hunter when police found his body, "lying supine on the ground" with a "laceration on the back of his head," near Shaw's BeBar on the night of Sept. 7. When police initially classified the 37-year-old Maryland man's beating as a potential hate crime, they did so based on the few details they could ascertain about the victim: who he was and where he was going. The assailants, police reasoned, may have been acting on the same basic information—that Hunter was gay and headed to a gay bar—in an attack that had no immediately apparent motive.

In police reports, descriptions of suspects similarly lack specifics. In the case of Tony Hunter, the report identified the suspects as four black males between the ages of 19 and 22, dressed in blue jeans and T-shirts. Other recent attacks against gays produce similar descriptors. In the July 13 beating of Todd Metrokin, the assailants were described as black men between the ages of 17 and 21. In a Sept. 27 incident in Dupont, a gay couple dodged the word "faggot"—and a heaved brick—from a black man they later identified as a security guard at the Metropole.

As cases progress, however, assumptions of type give way to particulars. Unlike the cases of Metrokin and the Dupont couple, which police investigators identified as hate-bias motivated, Hunter's assault was missing one telltale sign of a hate crime: There was no evidence that "faggot" or any other epithet was uttered. Shortly into the investigation of Hunter's case, police began referring to the beating as an apparent robbery, citing car keys and cash that appeared to be missing from Hunter's body. By the time Hunter died, succumbing to what the medical examiner described as "Blunt Impact Head Trauma" 10 days after the attack, police had abandoned the suspected motive of anti-gay prejudice. "There is nothing to indicate at this time that this crime was motivated by hate or bias," wrote police department spokesperson Traci Hughes the day after Hunter's death. Later that day, Matt Ashburn of the police department's Gay and Lesbian Liason Unit supported Hughes' statement, writing: "[T]he crime is NOT classified as a hate/bias crime."

The hate-crime declassification by police investigators came several days before they had the chance to interview the alleged assailant in the case: Robert "Rob" Hannah, the most wanted of the suspects cited in the police report. Several members of the GLBT community similarly decried the incident as a "hate crime" before Hannah's identity was made public. Dana Fonville, identifying himself as a friend of Hunter's, told the Washington Blade, "The police tell us they don't have evidence that this was a hate crime and that it was a robbery. But the person or persons who did this committed a senseless and hateful act." During a vigil in Hunter's honor, the Rev. Abena McCray of D.C.'s Unity Fellowship Church prayed for a victim of hate. "We ask you for a healing, Lord, at this space where someone's head was beaten for no real reason other than ignorance," the Blade reports McCray as saying.

Prosecutors, however, have their own standards for determining hate crimes; after reviewing the facts, the U.S. Attorney's Office chose not to pursue the hate-crime enhancement in Hannah's case. Special Liaison Unit commander Brett Parson noted that "hate crime" often means different things to police, prosecutors, and the community they serve. "It depends if you're asking from a legal perspective or a general person's perspective," says Parson. "Once the facts become public, the people will draw their own conclusions from it." In the Hunter case, lack of the legal hate-crime tag has left community members to classify the incident themselves as a type of "unofficial" hate crime. Police and prosecutors could find no hard evidence to pursue a hate-crime investigation; the community, meanwhile, could find no other explanation as to why a gay man was dead.

Last week, police arrested Hannah and charged him with voluntary manslaughter in Hunter's death. In an affidavit filed in D.C. Superior Court, the motive in the case was again modified; in place of the robbery scenario, the incident was now being described as an "altercation." Despite the previous abandonment of the hate-crime motive, Hunter's sexual orientation arose again in the affidavit as a potential basis of the attack. In a police interview, Hannah and one other witness claimed that the "altercation" was incited when Hunter sexually assaulted Hannah, coming up behind him, groping his ass and touching his testicles. The witness, an acquaintance of Hannah's, noted that the victim "appeared to be 'Gay.'" A different witness on the scene, though, claims a group of men approached Hunter and proceeded to beat him; yet another witness claims to have seen Hannah standing over Hunter's body and chanting the name of his crew, the Terrace, before leaving the scene. Neither of those witnesses mentions the alleged come-on.

With the lines in the case already drawn, Hannah's version of events has incited new calls of "hate crime" from the gay community. Todd Metrokin and Chris Farris—who together led the charge to resurrect D.C.'s Gays and Lesbians Opposing Violence (GLOV) group last month–say that the suspect's very defense in the case is enough to support a hate-crime investigation. "It looks like they're going with manslaughter because of something we call the 'gay panic' defense," says Metrokin. It's a defense Farris calls both "familiar" and "repugnant." "The fact that the suspect is pointing to gayness as an excuse shows the requisite bias," Farris says. "That the defendant is even coming up with this story shows that it's a hate crime."

More pressing than the abandonment of the hate crime classification, Farris and Metrokin say, is the charge of voluntary manslaughter. Farris says the charge indicates that prosecutors have neglected to look beyond Hannah's "gay panic" story to other possible motives in the case. "It is hard for me to imagine how randomly coming upon somebody and punching them to the point where he falls over and becomes unconscious and then dies is anything short of murder," says Farris. "I'm not a criminal law expert, but if this is legally not considered murder, we're going to have to change the law."

While the determination between manslaughter and murder comes down to discerning the intent to kill, classifying hate crimes means dealing in murkier psychological territory. The District of Columbia passed its hate-crime legislation, the Bias-Related Crime Act of 1989, nearly 20 years ago. According to D.C. code, a hate crime is defined as "a designated act that demonstrates an accused's prejudice based on the actual or perceived race, color, religion, national origin, sex, age, marital status, personal appearance, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, family responsibility, physical disability, matriculation or political affiliation of a victim."

A mental bias against homosexuals can be almost impossible to prove without a more concrete expression of it—written or verbal epithets, for example, or membership in an organized anti-gay group. Even the Dupont couple, who say they dodged a very real brick along with verbal epithets and threats of future intimidation, were told there wasn't enough evidence to prosecute the offender. The U.S. Attorney's office dismissed the couple's case; in an e-mail, spokesperson Channing Phillips told Metro Weekly, "as unpleasant and demeaning as 'name-calling' may be, words alone are not a crime." The couple's validation is also of the unofficial type: According to the Washington Blade, the suspect has been removed from his security post at the Metropole.

Official statistics under-represent crimes within the GLBT community in many ways: According to FBI crime stats, only a female can be raped, for example, and transgender persons are officially ignored. The hate-crime motive is so difficult to determine that reports are nothing if not woefully inaccurate; Farris and Metrokin say their crusade for the hate crime classification is more to make sure crimes against gays go reported than to allow for harsher sentencing of the accused. Still, enough crimes satisfy the necessary criteria to make D.C. a statistical anomaly among states that report hate crime data. As local gay rights activists are quick to point out, the majority of the District's reported hate crimes are based on sexual orientation bias. In 2006, 60 percent of the 57 hate crimes in D.C. reported to the FBI were biased against sexual orientation; the national average is just over 15 percent. The most recent Police Department stats for 2008 show nearly 75 percent of hate crimes in D.C. to be based on sexual orientation. Less reported, though, is the other strange truth of D.C. hate crime stats: While most hate crimes nationwide are committed by whites, in D.C.—a city with a 60 percent black population—many hate-crime offenders are minorities, too.

It is in borderline cases like Hunter's that this fact—that hate crimes in D.C. amount to one minority group attacking another—becomes most complicated. Like Hunter, little is publicly known about Robert Hannah beyond his initial description in the police report. Most can be inferred from Hannah's photograph on the wanted flyer announcing the warrant for his arrest: Hannah is a black man; at 18 years old, he is slightly younger than the report imagined. The only other info on Hannah, whose name in official reports is spelled with and without the final "h," is that he's last known to have resided in a Shaw apartment complex, and that he is connected with the Terrace, which the affidavit describes as "a group of subjects who live in or frequent the areas of 6th & N Street, 7th & N Street, as well as the area of 8th & N Street NW." In short, we know little more about Hannah than who he was and where he was going.

When BeBar opened in 2006, it situated itself at a borderline of District gentrification, only a few blocks from both Hannah's apartment and the Walter E. Washington Convention Center. The little we know about Tony Randolph Hunter indicates that he also represented an intersection of D.C. culture—Hunter was both black and gay. A Blade piece on the Sept. 30 vigil for Hunter nodded to the divide. "Following a memorial service for Hunter at the church, participants walked about five blocks through the heart of the city's Shaw neighborhood to the site where Hunter was attacked at 8th and N Streets," wrote Blade reporter Lou Chibbaro Jr. "Before reaching their destination, participants walked past public housing projects that city officials say are home to some of the youth gangs, or crews, that have been implicated in a rash of violent muggings and shootings in the neighborhood."

Such casual neighborhood glances point to the complicated intersection of biases that comes to play in these unofficial hate crimes. Absent the epithet, hate-group card, or admission of guilt, the importance of a victim's "actual or perceived" sexual orientation in a crime comes down to the suspect's perceived bias. Is an after-the-fact excuse—an invocation of the gay panic defense—enough to prove prejudice? Or was it always enough that Hunter was a gay black man, and Hannah a straight one? Both sides, in absence of specifics, return to type. "What they're asking us to believe is that a man from Maryland parked his car to go into a gay bar and on his way walked up to a group of strangers and reached out to one of them and grabbed him below the waist. This is not believable," Farris says. "Here's what they know: That a thug says he killed somebody because a guy grabbed his crotch. The bias there is evident."

Photo by Darrow Montgomery.

Of particular interest to members of the GLBT community, Chief Lanier stated the case was thoroughly reviewed by prosecutors at the United States Attorney’s Office and there is no evidence to support a hate crime enhancement. Furthermore, Chief Lanier indicated the initial suspected motive of robbery was eventually determined by investigators to not be correct and that the death of Mr. Hunter resulted from an altercation between Mr. Hunter and Mr. Hanna, during which Mr. Hunter suffered injuries which lead to his death.

Mr. Hanna will be presented in the District of Columbia Superior Court, at which time a judge will determine if he will be released or jailed pending the judicial process.

Note: I've seen different spellings of the suspect's name, re: Hanna/Hannah, from MPD documents. Will update when I get word from MPD.

Full statement after the jump.

From GLLU Community Outreach Specialist Matt Ashburn:

On October 15, 2008, members of the Metropolitan Police Department’s (MPDC) Joint Fugitive Task force located and arrested 18 year old Robert Hanna, who was being sought pursuant to a District of Columbia Superior Court arrest warrant charging him with Voluntary Manslaughter, related to the death of Tony Randolph Hunter.

Members of the MPDC's Homicide Branch, particularly Detectives Jacqueline Middleton and Jed Worrell, along with members of the Joint Fugitive Task Force, worked tirelessly to ensure the capture of Mr. Hanna. Chief Lanier held a press conference this afternoon, during which she thanked members of the community who had cooperated with investigators and also the countless tips that were forwarded to investigators using the MPDC’s TIP line.

Of particular interest to members of the GLBT community, Chief Lanier stated the case was thoroughly reviewed by prosecutors at the United States Attorney’s Office and there is no evidence to support a hate crime enhancement. Furthermore, Chief Lanier indicated the initial suspected motive of robbery was eventually determined by investigators to not be correct and that the death of Mr. Hunter resulted from an altercation between Mr. Hunter and Mr. Hanna, during which Mr. Hunter suffered injuries which lead to his death.

Mr. Hanna will be presented in the District of Columbia Superior Court, at which time a judge will determine if he will be released or jailed pending the judicial process.
–
Matt W. Ashburn, Auxiliary #1314
Special Liaison Unit
Executive Office of the Chief of Police
Washington, DC Metropolitan Police Department
1369-A Connecticut Avenue N.W., Washington, D.C. 20036
E-mail: matthew.ashburn@dc.gov

It's been over a month since Tony Randolph Hunter, a gay man, was assaulted near BeBar on the evening of Sept. 7. After a stay in the hospital, Hunter was pronounced dead on Sept. 17. A day after Hunter's death, police announced that the crime was not being classified as a "hate crime."

Now, D.C. police have secured a warrant for the arrest of a Robert Hannah (pictured) in connection with Hunter's death. About an hour ago, MPD sent out an "urgent bulletin" announcing that Hannah, who is known as "Rob," is wanted for "Voluntary Manslaughter in connection with the beating death of Tony Hunter." Hannah is described as "a 18-year-old black male (DOB: 8/11/1990), 5'7" in height, and 148 lbs." Police released this "Wanted" flier, which citizens are directed to distribute. Download the flier here [PDF].

Those with information about the case are directed to contact Detective Jed Worrell at (202) 645-9618 or 202 486-1596 (cell); Detective Jackie Middleton at (202) 645-5501 or 202 497-4606 (cell); or the MPD Command Information Center at (202) 727-9099. Anonymous tips can be called in to 1-888-919-CRIME, or texted to 50411.