#TBT: President Obama Signs Landmark Hate Crime Bill

 

     On October 28th, 2009, Barack Obama signed into law the Matthew Shepard And James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act, named after two men brutally murdered in separate instances in 1998 because of their sexual orientation. The law expanded existing hate crime legislation to include gender, disability status, sexual orientation, and sexual identity; removed requisites that made hate crime cases harder to prosecute; appropriated funding to prosecute these offenses; and mandated the FBI track statistics on hate crimes based on sexual orientation and identity (statistics on women and the disabled were already tracked at the time).

     This law has resulted in dozens of successful prosecutions, including a group of men who ran a Hispanic man off the road, a group of men who branded a Swastika into a disabled Navajo man, a family that killed a gay man, and a man who killed his transgender ex-girlfriend.