Dumb Kid Gets Hate-Crime Allegation on Top of Miserable Future

I can't resist the urge to defend the perpetrator of a hate crime...

Last week in Oxnard, CA, fourteen-year-old Brandon McInerney fatally shot Lawrence King, an openly gay fifteen-year-old. In response, King's friends organized a march that attracted nearly a thousand friends and supporters. Participants voiced their anti-homophobia: said one thirteen year-old boy, "It will be a better future if we are more tolerant."

Regardless of how soon such a future will come to pass for the rest of us, Brandon McInerney's future will doubtless be fairly bleak. McInerney is the fourteen-year-old boy who shot and killed King. According to a friend of King's, King had recently told McIrnerey he had a crush on him. McInerney, for reasons not mentioned by the LA Times, will be tried as an adult. He stands to spend fifty years in prison. For good measure, prosecutors added a hate-crime allegation; this could mean an extra one to three years.

A hate-crime allegation?? I know there are going to be some people out there who are getting a good deal of satisfaction out of the severity of this response. But leaving alone the fact that a fourteen-year-old is being tried as an adult in the first place, have we seriously gotten to the point where we're imprisoning teenage boys for being homophobic?! Without teenage boys, where do these people think we're going to get our homophobia?

Let's not forget what (may have) precipitated this tragedy: King had just told McInerney he had a crush on him! Said one schoolmate, "I see no point in shooting someone for telling them that you like them"--a particularly moving response. True enough, but let's allow for the possibility that McInerney's reaction was rooted in a fear that he might too be gay. Or that he was terrified of being associated with the very gay Lawrence King (he wore make-up and stuff). Pervasive homophobia is not just what killed Lawrence King; it is arguably also what has doomed Brandon McInerney to years behind bars and all that comes with that.

I know, I know--we would never accept such a defense for Matthew Shepard's killers. And hell, McInerney may very well be a psychotic menace to society best to leave to his own defenses in prison for a good long time. But is our thirst for retribution here so strong that we are ready to give bonus years in prison to a 14-year-old for his expression of "homophobia"? (A homophobia which, I can only speculate, might have been rooted in feelings of attraction? Or in the immature, adolescent need to prove one's manhood?)

I don't think I support hate-crime legislation to begin with--I ought to come out of the closet about that right away. I'm gay, if that makes you feel any better about it. And I don't know how fourteen-year-old killers should be dealt with. Maybe the little shit should spend fifty years behind bars. But one to three years for, on top of being violent, being the type of kid who calls people "fags"?

Let's hope the gay-rights movement isn't celebrating.