Aaron Hall UPDATE:

Courtesy of Advance Indiana

Wednesday, January 16, 2008

Judge Accepts Hall Killer's Manslaughter Plea Agreement

Jackson Circuit Court Judge Bill Vance agreed with county prosecutors that an 18-year-old man who brutally beat a 5'4", Aaron "Shorty" Hall and then dumped his nude body along a secluded farm road to die in the cold should be sentenced to just 30 years for voluntary manslaughter and not murder. With good time credit, Hall should be a free man in about 15 years. Coleman King's attorneys didn't even have to offer a single witness or a single piece of evidence to win this incredible plea agreement. Aubrey Woods of the Crothersville Times describes the courtroom scene at King's sentencing hearing:

During his plea hearing, King admitted to beating Hall to death. King said he became extremely irritated and angry when Hall questioned his sexuality and grabbed King’s crotch.

That incident occurred as the two drank beer and whiskey with Gray at Gray’s home, 6420 S. 1025E, Crothersville, according to court documents. King also admitted he kicked Hall in the head more than one time after Hall was taken to a rural Crothersville area and left on the ground near Cinder Road.

King said he knew Hall might die if he kicked him in the head with his cowboy boots. King and Gray later retrieved Hall’s body from a field near where he was left and took it back to Gray’s home.

Police found Hall’s body wrapped in a blue tarp behind cabinets in the garage on April 24. Police found the body after an investigation began when Hall was reported missing by an acquaintance.

Sabrina Baker, the mother of Hall’s 10-year-old daughter, also testified during Tuesday’s sentencing hearing. “You permanently damaged her,” Baker said of her daughter. “All she has left of him now is pictures and memories. Shorty was so much to so many people. Now all we have is to visit his grave.”

King’s attorney, Joseph Payne, called no witnesses or presented any evidence or statements during the hearing, which lasted less than 10 minutes.

Payne declined to comment after the hearing.

After the hearing, Deputy Prosecutor Amy Travis said the family was in agreement with the plea deal and that she always tries to go along with wishes of the family if they fall within the scope of the law.

Wood's story omits the fact that King just didn't kick Hall in the head once with his boot, but more than 70 times he used a boot to strike Hall's body. The beating took place over a several hour period according to the killer's own confessions. It is beyond human understanding that the Hall family would accept this pathetic plea agreement. I'm not even going to begin to understand this place called Jackson County, Indiana. What happened in that courtroom today is an affront to the American criminal justice system. Matthew Shepard's killers tried to use a gay panic defense in Wyoming to escape a more serious murder charge. Wyoming courts wouldn't allow it. In Hall's case, the defense attorneys claim they weren't invoking any gay panic defense, but clearly prosecutors felt that a Jackson County jury would be sympathetic to King's and his co-killer, Garrett Gray's statement that the beating which led to Hall's death happened because of a supposed unwanted sexual advance. There is absolutely nothing in their video-taped confessions which supports a theory of manslaughter. This was a cold-blooded murder and nothing less.

Illustrating the absurdity of today's 30-year sentence for King, today a Marion County judge sentenced Robert Quarles to 30 years in prison for trying to hire another person to kill his wife. Or take the case of 18-year-old Jamie Carson, grandson of the late U.S. Rep. Julia Carson. He received a 120-year prison term after he was found guilty in 1999 of several home invasions and a hate crime attack on two of his victims. The victims were two Hispanic men who were gay. Carson and his accomplices forced the two men to perform sex acts on each other at gunpoint, burned them with a steam iron, tied them together and taunted them with homophobic remarks. One of the men was forced to drink a mixture of urine and bleach. As bad as Quarles' and Carson's crimes were, their victims were not killed. In the case of Carson, he will spend the rest of his life in prison. Coleman King and Garrett Gray will be released when they are in their 30s, or about the same age as Aaron Hall was when they brutally ended his life.

Meanwhile, there may be some hope that Indiana will join the civilized world and enact a hate crimes law. For the second consecutive year, the House Courts and Criminal Code Committee has passed hate crimes legislation authored by Rep. Greg Porter, HB 1076, by a vote of 8-3. The bill is co-authored by two Republicans, 7th District congressional candidate Rep. Jon Elrod (R-Indianapolis) and Rep. Ralph Foley (R-Martinsville). Three Republicans on the committee voted against the bill, Rep. Eric Koch (R-Bedford), Rep. Greg Steuerwald (R-Danville) and Rep. John Ulmer (R-Goshen). Elrod was the only Republican on the committee who voted for HB 1076.

The so-called "bias crimes" legislation will allow judges to impose harsher sentences on persons who commit crimes against a person or their property because of their race, disability, national origin, religion, sexual orientation or gender identity. All but five states in the nation have adopted this legislation in some form. The religious right has successfully defeated the legislation in the past by mounting bigoted attacks, which have been focused on the legislation's inclusion of "sexual orientation" and "gender identity" and give gays and cross-dressers "special rights." Ironically, the opponents claim it will infringe upon their "freedom of speech" and "freedom of religion" rights. These, of course, are the same people who are determined to write discrimination into our state's constitution against gays, lesbians and unmarried persons.

End article

Just two comments:

1) How can someone drive home to get a shotgun and then return to kill someone and that not be premeditated murder?

2) Please, please, please urge your state legislators to support HR 1076 and ignore any pressures from the so-called religious right.

Indiana's Matthew Shepard?

This is an excellent piece by Gabriel Rotello:

The story of a horrifying murder in rural Indiana has begun making the rounds of the blogs, where it's being compared to the crucifixion of Matthew Shepard.

But the story's twists and turns, as disgusting as they are tragic, have gone largely unreported outside blogs like Daily Kos and Towleroad and a crusading local paper in Indiana, the Bloomington Alternative. And therein hangs a tale.

The victim in this new outrage wasn't called Aaron 'Shorty' Hall for nothing. Shorty was 5-foot-4 and weighed a mere 100 pounds. In beefy rural Indiana, that passes for almost invisible.

On April 12, Shorty was allegedly beaten to death by Coleman King, 18, and Garrett Gray, 19. They subsequently confessed to police that the beating began when Shorty allegedly made a gay pass at them while they were all drinking beer at Gray's home.

The description of what happened next is horrific, a savage assault that eerily echoes the tortuous death of Matthew Shepard. This time it took the form of a relentless beating that went on for several hours at Gray's house before Shorty was finally dragged down the wooden stairs, his head banging loudly on each step.

King and Gray told cops they beat Hall again at the bottom of the stairs, threw him into a pickup truck and continued beating him as they drove down a remote dirt road.

Once there, one of them had the audacity to send a friend a cellphone photo of the dying Shorty. Then they dumped him, naked but still alive, in a ditch. According to weather reports, it was 39 degrees that night.

The next morning they returned and found Shorty's broken and lifeless body in a field near the ditch. He had apparently crawled out for help, found none, and died alone in the dirt.

A few days later they returned, wrapped the body in a tarp and hid it in Gray's garage, where police found it after being alerted by the recipient of the cellphone photo.

A sensational torture/murder hate crime like this seems like a slam dunk for major media attention, but so far it has received almost none.

Perhaps part of the reason is one of the case's odd twists: Some have publicly suggested that in fact Shorty made no sexual advance on Gray and King and that he was not, in fact, gay.

Instead, it's been suggested that the two teens cooked up the gay angle because they believed that in homo-hating Indiana, it would help excuse their murder.

In the twisted teenage wasteland of their minds, the theory goes, the so-called 'gay panic' defense is still operative in Indiana: If you simply say your murder victim made a queer pass at you, you'll probably get off lightly.

It's impossible to tell if this version is true. But that's no reason for the media to ignore this story. In fact, in a weird way the tale is at least as significant if Shorty was not gay.

The reason begins with the fact that Indiana remains one of just five states that refuses to enact a hate crimes bill. Why? Because such a bill would cover -- you guessed it -- gays.

The latest version failed in the state legislature again this February, and the executive director of the antigay American Family Association of Indiana, Micah Clark, credited "concerned Christians" with scuttling it.

If such Christians hadn't furiously lobbied the Indiana Statehouse about this bill, Clark said, it "would have passed easily." He smugly added, "The good guys won on this issue."

Shorty Hall's lonely death indicates otherwise.

I'm not suggesting that if Indiana had passed a hate crimes bill last February then this horrific murder would not have happened. But I am suggesting what law schools have taught for generations: "The law is a great teacher."

One of the reasons for hate crimes laws is to teach: to send a powerful lesson that the kind of savage bigotry that leads to violence and murder based on race, ethnicity and other factors -- including sexual orientation -- is a profound offense against the moral foundations of our society.

Hate crime laws send the lesson that violators will not be treated more lightly for such crimes, as they traditionally were, but punished more sternly.

When a state like Indiana stands almost alone by refusing to send such a message, it unavoidably sends the opposite message. And in rural Indiana it does so in a place teeming with vengeful right wing Christians who continue to infect the young with a vile hatred of gays. That leads to a combustible combination.

So in this tragic case, whether Shorty was gay or not, or made a pass or not, isn't the larger point.

The larger point is that Shorty's killers appear to have imbibed a profound lesson from the homo-hating Christians of their state and the simpering cowards in their state legislature, who would apparently pass a hate crimes bill "easily" if it didn't include the gays despised by so-called concerned Christians.

That lesson is this: If a queer comes on to you in Indiana and you kill him, pipe up about it because you just might get a pass. And hey, if you happen to kill someone who isn't queer, just call him queer anyway and you still might get a pass.

Concerned Christians in Indiana may have no problem with that. But I'm betting that Jesus would take a dimmer view.