The murder of Michael Sandy in Brooklyn last year was heinous. A group of thugs arranged on the Internet to meet him for sex, then attacked Sandy, who fled into traffic on the Belt Parkway and was hit by a car. Four were involved, with the youngest assailant, who was only 17; he has since flipped on the rest of his friends.
Now one of the defendants, Michael Fortunato, is on trial for the murder and is claiming that he’s gay, and that the rendezvous with Sandy was a ploy designed by Fortunato to out himself to his friends. This is sick BS. (NYT):
All along, homosexuality has defined the case. Prosecutors have used it as a sword, seeking heavier sentences for a hate crime.According to the New York Daily News, investigators recovered a cache of homoerotic images and messages from Fortunato’s computer.As the trial began in Brooklyn Supreme Court yesterday, Mr. Fortunato’s lawyer, Gerald J. Di Chiara, sought to use sexual orientation as a shield. Without much explanation of how he planned to introduce this fact or turn it to his advantage, Mr. Di Chiara offered it to the jury in his opening argument. Not only was Mr. Fortunato gay, Mr. Di Chiara said, but so was the main prosecution witness, Gary Timmins, 17, who has pleaded guilty to attempted robbery in exchange for his testimony.
In fact, Mr. Di Chiara continued, Mr. Fortunato had planned to tell his friends of his sexual orientation on the night in question. Luring a gay man out to a secluded lot in Sheepshead Bay was part of that plan, Mr. Di Chiara said.
…Mr. Fortunato, he said, might have planned to smoke marijuana with Mr. Sandy as a means of testing his friends’ sentiments about homosexuality. Or, he said, perhaps Mr. Fortunato had wanted to swindle a gay man, to see how his friends reacted to a gay person. Or, he said, perhaps Mr. Fortunato had simply wanted to rob somebody.
If anyone had any doubt that the closet can kill, here we see the answer that blows doubt away. This young man thought that he could prove his machismo to his friends by fag-bashing and robbery. Nothing could be worse than being gay.
The prosecutor, Anna-Sigga Nicolazzi, said the plot was hatched by Fortunato, who told his friends, “You could always get a gay guy to meet you,” and trolled a chat room called “Brooklyn Man 4 Man” for a victim. Fortunato boasted he had ripped off a gay man he had lured to a motel in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, she said.Only when faced with additional jail time because of the status Sandy’s murder as a hate crime was Fortunato ready to come out of the closet. I seriously doubt that he have told his friends that he was gay if he and his friends had been successful in simply robbing or beating up Sandy that night. The self-loathing obviously ran deep. In the end, this defense cannot possibly succeed in deflecting the fact that it’s a hate crime. As a reader aptly pointed out, the basis for the assignment of a charge of a hate crime is the intent of the accused, not the identity of the accused.
14 Responses to “Even worse than the gay panic defense”
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I don’t understand this at all. How is some gay stranger suppose to help you come out to your friends? Was he going to prove he’s gay by doing it in front of them? It doesn’t make any sense!
(Head asplodes NOW!!)
WW
>>@@
Am I surprised that a closet-case could be a gay bashing murderer? No. There was a case several years ago in Minneapolis of some guy who had contracted HIV going through outdoor cruising areas and shooting people.
This is just fucked, though.
Sounds like the future Whitey Bulger, if only he wasn’t such a dumbfuck.
(Whitey apparently turned tricks in the 40s and then rolled his “dates” after as one of his sources of income).
Ah Whitey. The good days of “Old Southie” when Jimmy Kelly was around riling up the racists and Whitey was killing whomever he wanted.
It still sickens me when people reminisce about the goodness of “old southie.” I’m still not terribly comfortable in that part of the city, but am glad old southie died.
Duuuuhhhh. You have to be baptised in a tub full of Zima and swear to advance The Homosexual Agenda. If he didn’t do that, there’s no way his friends would have believed him, and they might not have attacked him.
So what? Even if his “I’m gay!” defense were true, he still committed the crime. And now everyone, like his gay bashing friends, knows/thinks he’s gay. Talk about a loose/loose situation.
Of course it doesn’t make any sense, because it’s a lie. As Pam said, this was a hate crime and it’s the proof that the closet can kill.
Are you sure you don’t want the lower-back tattoo discussion over at Feministe?
MAJeff - there was also a case in the late 80s in the UK of a guy who contracted HIV (and subsequently died of AIDS) because he regularly went out gay bashing with his friends. The thing that struck me about it was the realization that in order to get HIV he needed to be hitting his victims hard enough to both cause them to bleed *and* hard enough to break his own skin.
Sometimes the things that happen in this world just make me want to stick my head in the sand… or explode. I tend to prefer the idea of exploding because it’s so much more theatrical.
I sit back and worry about the jury. Given how American juries are selected we cannot avoid the fact that twelve fucking mouth breathers confused by doorknobs won’t be selected and let them go.
As far as this “making sense” it sounds to me as though the lawyer has decided that there is no effective way of avoiding the charges relating to actually being involved, but is using the coming out BS to try to prove that it could not possibly be a hate crime. As in, nobody could ever commit a hate crime against a member of a group they are part of.
The rest of it is just a back-construction in an effort to expaln some other possible reason why he would seek out a gay man to meet with his friends.
Seems to me that if there is a worst possible time to come out, just before you are convicted of a violent crime and facing a lot of jail time has to be right up there among the winners.
My reaction if I on was on the jury?
This is crap!
Hang them all for hate crimes.